The Conceptualization of Ensuring Local Economic Development: Foreign Experience and Possibilities of Its Adaptation for Ukraine

The purpose of the article is to study the conceptual foundations of local economic development in different countries of the world and provide recommendations on the possibility of adapting foreign experience for Ukraine. The article proposes the author’s own definition of the concept of «ensuring local economic development» from the point of view of a hierarchical approach as a system of public-managerial actions, measures and decisions aimed at increasing economic activity and satisfying local interests. The article explores the conceptual foundations of local economic development in the USA, Canada and Poland. Countries have different priorities, plans and areas of activity in local economic development, but it is common to take into account the economic realities of globalization, the balance of interests of a wide range of all stakeholders and partners, planning, the strategic nature of initiatives and the lack of unification of approaches to local economic development. The policy of ensuring local economic development in the United States in the context of modern challenges is being modernized, along with traditional instruments, novel methods of supporting local economic development appear. And the federal government plays a decisive and unique role in this process, developing policies of various influences on the regions and territories of the country based on their economic realities. Interesting conceptual directions for ensuring local economic development of Canadian territories in the current conditions are the conceptions of economic self-dependence and economic self-sufficiency, which are based on reducing dependence on the State-controlled subsidies, subventions, other economies, etc. The major role in the local economic development plays the Department of Regional and Local Development of Canada and Canadian Regional Development Agencies. Ensuring local economic development in Poland depends on the economic policies pursued by public authorities at the central, regional and local levels. Here it is worth noting a synchronized and proactive approach to the formation of strategic priorities, which includes taking into account the logical, spatial, temporal correspondence of all strategic attributes to achieve overall coherence of development directions at the national, regional and local levels, as well as significant support and financial assistance on the part of the European Union in the implementation of strategic goals of local economic development. Based on foreign experience, Ukraine needs to carry out the transformation of the State regional policy in order to develop and implement programs for the post-war recovery of regional economies. Local governments should focus on developing their own local economic development policy, which would be in line with the State regional policy of post-war recovery.