to the International Monetary Fund. History Before 1917 Geography has long influenced the economy of the Ukrainian lands. Rich fertile soils (such as chernozem areas) made the area a "breadbasket": for ancient Greece as well as for early modern Europe. The maintenance of trade corridors – the route from the Varangians to the Greeks and access through the Straits to the Mediterranean world – became important. Mineral resources encouraged industrialisation – notably in the Donbas – from the 19th century onwards. The lack of secure borders meant repeated interruptions in economic development. Steppe nomads and other conquerors – Cumans, Mongols, Tatars for example, sometimes saw plundering as more important than fostering economic development. In the 16th to 18th centuries, the wastelands of the Wild Fields left much of Ukraine as an area of tentatively militarised outposts, prior to tsarist Russia's extension of its power into the region in the 17th and 18th centuries. Soviet period: 1917 to 1991 1991 to 2000 On 24 August 1991, Ukraine established its independence from the Soviet Union. The new state's economy suffered huge output declines and soaring inflation in the following years. Ukraine saw hyperinflation in the early 1990s because of a lack of access to financial markets and massive monetary expansion to finance government spending, while output declined sharply. Huge output declines and soaring inflation was at the time common to most former Soviet republics, but Ukraine was among the hardest hit by these problems. In response to this hyperinflation the National Bank of Ukraine replaced the national currency, the karbovanets, with the hryvnia in September 1996 and pledged to keep it stable in relation to the US dollar. The currency remained unstable through the late 1990s, particularly during the 1998 Russian financial crisis. Deep recession during the 1990s led to a relatively high poverty rate, but beginning in 2001, seven straight years of economic growth, raised the living standard for most citizens. A World Bank report in 2007 noted: "Ukraine recorded one of the sharpest declines in poverty of any transition economy in recent years. The poverty rate, measured against an absolute poverty line, fell from a high of 32% in 2001 to 8% in 2005." The UN noted that Ukraine had overcome absolute poverty, and that there was only relative poverty in 2009. 2000 to 2014 Ukraine stabilised by the early 2000s. The year 2000 saw the first year of economic