Olga Kovalenko

The research aims to identify industrial and other economic sectors’ contribution to the regional divergence in Eastern European countries, particularly Poland and Ukraine. The ambiguity of the results of previous studies on the factors of regional convergence indicates the need for further research, considering the peculiarities of distinct economies’ development. The countries selected for analysis – Ukraine and Poland – had similar starting conditions for market transformation, have a common border, and a comparable population. The analysis of regional inequality in Ukraine revealed a tendency of asymmetric regions’ growth in 2010–2017. In Poland, divergent trends in regional development in 2009–2017 were significantly less pronounced. The statistical method to identify the impact of the industrial, agricultural, and service sectors on regional σ-convergence based on coefficients of variation measuring the differences in regional economies’ sectoral structure was used. The analysis demonstrated that, in general, the uneven structure of regional economies does not significantly impact any of the analyzed countries, which confirmed the results of some other studies. Simultaneously, it highlighted that the industrial sector had the greatest impact on regional divergence in Poland. Despite the dominant role of services in regional divergence in Ukraine, most researchers emphasize the importance of the industrial sector for regional development. To consider this factor in the regional divergence of Ukrainian regions, some regional policy implications were considered.

The global food market is in constant transformation. Cyclical fluctuations and force majeure (financial crises, epidemics, military actions) affect the volumes of production, consumption, exports and imports of food products. Therefore, the study of the dynamic stability of the growth of world food markets is especially relevant. The purpose of the study is to assess the dynamic stability of economic growth in the world food markets: cheese, butter and sugar. The study used general scientific and special methods: dialectical and logical to summarize the scientific foundations for ensuring the sustainable development of world food markets; regression analysis – to determine the direction of market development; variational analysis – to determine the sustainability of market development. The advantage of the approach proposed in the paper is the assessment of the direction of development by the regression coefficients and the amplitude of fluctuations by the average percentage of deviations from the trend, which allows more correct interpretation of the results than when using only the coefficient of variation, which takes into account changes around the average value. It is established that the world markets for cheese, butter and sugar from 2011 to 2020 are characterized by dynamically stable growth in production, consumption, exports and imports. However, the markets of individual countries have developed unevenly: cheese production is most attractive and less risky in the EU, Brazil and South Korea; butter production in the EU and India; sugar production – in the USA, India, Algeria. Forecast calculations confirm the likelihood of growth in these markets.