Economic and Legal Mechanisms for Effective Use of Land Resources Under the Conditions of Sustainable Development in Ukraine

Abstract

Sustainable society development distinctly entails the issues of sustainable use of land and especially soils, which are the place and condition of human activity, the means of production that provide absolute value, and a unique natural resource. Ukraine possesses nine percent of the world’s black soil (chernozem) resources, which necessitates the development of sufficient economic and legal mechanisms for their effective use in ensuring food security within the country and worldwide, increasing the export potential of Ukraine subject to the soil quality restoration, and determines the scope of this work. The land reform in Ukraine as a component of economic reform has led to a significant deterioration of agricultural land, loss of humus from soils, their degradation, and other negative consequences threatening the country’s economic security and generating socio-economic and demographic crisis phenomena, especially in rural areas. Therefore, the study has identified priorities and has proposed the use of contractual mechanisms in the field of sustainable socio-economic use of land resources. The authors applied an integrated approach to the analysis of sustainable land use issues to achieve the study objective. This led to the use of a wide range of methodological tools, in particular, the dialectical method, the formal logical method, the logical legal method and the methods of analysis, synthesis and comparison. Defined provisions that determine the economic and legal mechanism of land use and should be ensured in the process of sustainable development: meeting the needs of landowners and other persons, including the priority needs – environmental and food security; an increase in the area of land not involved in the economic turnover, the adoption of measures aimed at the preservation and restoration of agricultural land, in particular compliance with the requirements for crop rotation, and, in some cases, their conservation; introduction of contractual relations in the field of land use.

Keywords: sustainable development, efficient land use, land ownership, contractual land use, land reform

JEL Classification: K25, O13, Q15