Nadiya Dekhtyar

Purposeful and reasonable state vision of the long-term tourism development strategy determines the success of a country in the world market of tourist services. Many countries have officially approved program documents that clearly outline the main goals and objectives of the state policy in the sphere of tourism, highlighting the resource potential, recreational infrastructure and preferred consumer markets, but there may be no idea of respecting the interests of domestic consumers. The maintenance of local tourism infrastructure is becoming an increasingly important prerequisite for the country’s competitiveness, as mass tourism is now replaced by individual travels. The article is aimed at studying the dependencies between the main macroeconomic indicators of the tourism industry, assessing the efficiency of foreign trade. The correlation-regression and cluster analysis has been used in order to confirm or refute the hypothesis if the effectiveness of the state support of the national tourism industry is dependent on the stable functioning of the domestic tourism market, e.g. stimulation of travels by residents. Based on the main macroeconomic indicators of the tourism industry for 136 countries of the world and overview of some national tourism development program, the analysis output has rejected the direct correlation between the support of the domestic market and export potential of the national tourism industry, but has proved the significance of the inner consumer power during the periods of downturns in the global economy for strengthening the country’s export potential.

Now there is no single approach to the planning of normative indicators of the foreign trade structure and the optimization of foreign economic operations, including marketing mix, which consider the priorities of socio-economic development of the territories acting as the global market agents. The work proposes an expanded method for using the Grubel-Lloyd and Horvath indices when assessing the level of inter-industry trade, which will determine the priority fields of international cooperation in the process of developing a foreign economic strategy both at the state level and for an individual company interested in expanding the geography of trade in the global market via finding new partners and using non-discriminating marketing methods.
The article reveals the existing trends in foreign trade of Ukraine that predispose current economic policy and foster the initiation of a new exporting strategy. Namely, the volume of total external debt exceeded GDP in 2014–2016; although a significant reduction of this ratio has been observed since 2017 due to the GDP shortening. Unfavorable trends were supplemented by the negative total balance of trade in goods and services in 2014–2018, with redistributing geographical structure in favor of the EU instead of the CIS countries (however, the exports in services, measured by absolute income, exceeded imports). The Grubel-Lloyd and Horvath indices, calculated for the recent trade data, proved a high level of diversification of Ukraine’s foreign economic activity, with significant intra-industry trade, but the scores of the Grubel-Lloyd index did not coincide by the geographical and commodity structure for the prevailing majority of countries. Nevertheless, new potential exporting destinations may be found, precisely because of the detected imbalances.

Further improvement of financial relations at the local level and the development of local budgets take place in the context of financial decentralization. This implies strengthening the role of local governments in attracting necessary financial resources to ensure socio-economic development of territories. The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of decentralization on the state of local budgets and to develop a scientific and methodological approach to assessing the level of financial decentralization of local budgets using the example of Ukraine for 2010–2019. The developed methodology consists of six successive stages. A comparative analysis of the dynamics of indicators of local budget execution in Ukraine in terms of revenues, expenditures and transfers using an integrated index obtained through taxonomic analysis is conducted. As a result of evaluating the effectiveness of the basic principles of financial decentralization, the expediency of calculating the integrated index of local budget financial decentralization is substantiated. This index is formed using intermediate indicators of autonomy to cover expenses and generate income both on the basis of own sources and taking into account the received state transfers for the implementation of their own and delegated powers of local governments. The implementation of the proposed method allow one to assess the levels of financial decentralization of local budgets to establish the degree of financial autonomy and financial self-sufficiency of the territories. The results obtained should be considered when determining the effectiveness of financial support for local budgets in the process of socio-economic development of regions.