Structural indicators of processing industry of Ukraine and EU member states: comparative assessment

The liberalization of the conditions for conducting foreign economic operations, in particular - the establishment of a free trade zone between Ukraine and the European Union (EU), upgraded the need to increase the competitiveness of Ukrainian commodity producers to the level of the EU member states. The main link in the chain of formation of commodity exports is the processing industry. Hence, the objective of the paper is to carry out a comparative assessment of key structural indicators of the processing industry of Ukraine and the EU member states in terms of production.According to the results of the set of indicators’ calculations, it is established that Ukrainian processing industry is highly specialized, since its structure is dominated by two types of industries - food and metallurgy, which produce near 50% of the total output, gross value-added (GVA) and GVA of export of this type of industrial activity. Instead, in the EU- 28 in the output structure and GVA of the processing industry, the share of key productions (food and transport) is in total less than a third, and the gap between the largest and the smallest shares tends to decrease, while in Ukraine, by contrast, it is increasing. The basis of the commodity structure of exports in the EU-28 is the production of high-tech manufacturing (machines, computers, pharmaceuticals). Ukraine is generally inferior to the EU-28 in terms of the share of GVA in the production of the processing industry (excluding coke, other vehicles and textiles production). A comparative analysis of the GVA structure of Ukrainian and Polish processing industries has shown the need for its further improvement in Ukraine, in particular - in the direction of optimizing the taxation and subsidizing systems of the national industry.