COMPETITIVE RELATIONS IN THE ECONOMY OF EUROPEAN UNION COUNTRIES

Background. Nowadays the question about coordination of main directions how to protect the competitive relations on the national level with European Union is very actual and insufficiently researched. Analysis of recent researches and publication. Scientists pay significant attention to the regulations of competitive legislation of different countries since a competition is the engine of economic development ant it's regulation is under precise interest of scientists. However, research of protection of competitive relations is not under proper attention today that's caused a choice of the topic of the article. The aim of the article is to study the characteristics of state protection of competitive relations between the EU and Ukraine to further harmonization of national competition legislation to EU's one. Materials and methods. The study used national legislation in the antimonopoly and state regulation, the European Union treaties, as well as scientific literature. General scientific and special methods, namely, dialectical, abstract logic, induction and deduction, system analysis and synthesis and a method of historical and logical analysis have been applied to solve the tasks. Results. The state regulation of competitive relations is provided by competitive legislation. Basic legislative documents of the European Union and Ukraine regulating the area of economic competition protection have been analysed in the article. The main directions of state protection of competitive relations in national economy are the control of: usage of monopolistic (dominant) position, agreements limiting competition, agreements of economic concentration. The main exceptions from competitive legislation of the European Union and Ukraine with regard to agreements between business entities established on legislative level have been provided. In general, the regulations of national competitive legislation corresponds to law standards of the European Union, however of passive component and insufficient law enforcement that is not effective in terms of transitive economy prevail. Conclusion. The analysis showed that directions of the state protection of competitive relations require an improvement. It has been proposed to reinforce existing regulations of competitive legislation with active component, in particular, to pay attention to construction and increase of competitive culture in society through the application of competition advocacy.