Problems of Determining the Nature of Housing Services as a Specific Public Benefits and Specific Object of Economic Control

The purpose of this article is to identify the main problems in determining the nature of housing and communal services as specific public benefits; to define the place of these services in the system of social-economic relations and to formulate on this basis rational objects of economic control as a management function of process providing housing and communal services. We have researched different views available in domestic scientific area on the essence of housing and communal services as a specific public benefits. It was also reviewed today's popular approaches to the definition of housing and communal services as goods, as services and some variants of the combined identification. It was proved that any attempt by modern scientists to submit a separate housing and communal services as a goods, firstly, been insufficiently substantiated, and secondly, do not correspond to the economic content of public benefits that are provided in the housing and utilities sector. On the basis of clarifying the essence of housing and communal services as a specific public benefits was reviewed the advisability of revising the legal definition of these services. It was concluded that the current definition of housing and communal services, and also their distribution according to functional purpose and procedure for approval of prices/tariffs can be taken as a basis for forming an efficient information control subsystem of the management system providing housing and communal services.