Research background: This article investigates the connection between consumer’s budget growth and diversification of household spending. The main question of research is “are there new drivers of modern processes of consumer spending's diversification, at a time when spending on food has reached the minimum share in the consumer budget. Purpose of the article: The objective of the article is to clarify the hypothesis about the existence of a certain limit of income (and consumer spending) after which the growing of consumer’s purchasing capacity loses power of influence on spending diversity. Methods: Theil entropy index was used for measuring the diversity of household spending. This index was defined as a sum of within-group and between-group entropy, which allows for comparing the diversification of household spending in two aggregate groups of expenditure, which were formed by the authors. The Workings’ equation was used for modeling the spending entropy’s dependence on their absolute value. Two categories of household spending were regrouped (consolidated) by us through forming a group more related to the development of human economic potential (SMRHD) and less related to these processes (SLRHD). The research was done on the basis of ICP (2011) data, which covers 178 countries and refers to 2011 year — the latest available on the moment of the article was completed. Findings & Value added: The results obtained in this research confirmed that there is a limit of household spending’s size, beyond which further increasing of consumers’ economic opportunities loses a significant impact on the diversity of consumption spending. However, the weakening of the link between size of spending and its entropy reflects impact of two qualitative differenced factors. The first is relatively much more radical decrease of spending growth influence on within-group entropy for SLRHD. The second — is relatively much less significant decrease of entropy’s sensitivity to spending growth for SMRHD. Such results reflect the increase in the importance of "non-functional demand components", which reduces the capacity of data on functional distribution of household expenditures to characterize the extent of their diversification.

In this paper we study the antecedents and consequences of modern transformation which happens with relations between production and consumption. A theoretical justification of the thesis about blurring relationship between growth of consumer's opportunities and resource provision's improvement for human capital accumulation is proposed. The reason for this phenomenon is called the predominance of one from two forms of consumption expansion. Specifically, the predominance of the growth of consumer goods diversity, in comparison with increase of their availability is in our opinion the reason for weakening the positive impact of consumption growth on the accumulation of human capital. An empirical confirmation of this thesis is revealed in the analysis of variance in connection between scale of individual consumption and labor productivity in the group of European countries, as well as the U.S. and Japan.

This article is devoted to defining Ukraine’s position among 28 OECD countries relative to the averaged line of connection between resources of the social sphere and the society achievements in terms of human development index. Such positioning allows us to obtain a comparative assessment of the effectiveness of usage resource, directed to funding the education and healthcare by OECD countries and Ukraine. The model that expresses the HDI dependence on three main groups of factors was used. First – the amount of education and healthcare resources (evaluated by private and public spending on education and healthcare per capita). The second – is the way of rationing the population's access to these industries products (evaluated by coefficients of inequality of life expectancy and inequality in education). The third – is the indicators, displaying the efficiency of resources using within the industry (estimated as a result of modeling). Our results have confirmed that the resources, allocated to the public sector of education have the most significant impact on HDI size and this indicator is more dependent on the amount of social sphere resources in post-socialist countries than in "old" OECD members. The actual level of HDI in Ukraine is lower than estimated by model-averaged for countries, included in the sample. This means that Ukraine uses resources of its social sphere with lower efficiency than observed as average for countries, included in the sample. Such results allow us to obtain assessment which part of restrictions and problem experienced by national social spheres is caused by the scarcity of resources, divided to social sphere funding, and which – by imperfections, inherent to the regulative institutions of the social sphere. Such results may serve as a significant precondition of social policy development, especially for post-soviet countries.

Abstract. Using the results of the sample survey, conducted among the energy companies during the fourth quartal of 2020 within the grant, provided by ESP USAID we have obtained new empirical evidence of size and factors of the gender wage gap in Ukrainian energetics and about spreading of that phenomenon among different professions groups. As the main factors, determining the size of wage were considered the educational level (four groups were identified), length of service in the company (five groups were identified), and respondent’s position / workplace in the company’s qualification hierarchy (eight groups were identified). The results obtained evidences, that leading factor in the gender pay gap in Ukrainian energetics is the unequal access of women and men to gaining the characteristics necessary for increasing wages. In particular, the disparity in the distribution of the total number of female and male respondents between the qualification levels (the average qualification level of women is 4.8 vs. 5.4 for men). Gender gap formation through unequal remuneration of labour of women and men who have similar characteristics of experience, qualifications and complexity of the work is localized in the lower qualification levels (from the 2nd to the 4th), and through inequality of access to high-paying work is manifested in the absence of women at the highest (8th) qualification level, a clear predominance of men at the 7th qualification level and a noticeable predominance at the third qualification level, which in terms of payment outscores both the 5th and 6th qualification levels. Accordingly, the leading factor in the gender pay gap is the predominance of men at the three highest paid qualification levels. Localization of differences in remuneration of similar characteristics of qualifications, experience and complexity of work at lower levels of the qualification hierarchy, as well as the weakening of such inequality as the experience of employees increases, indicates that the problem of gender inequality is more inherent in the segment of «peripheral» employment. As the skills and experience grow (respectively, the value of employees to employers), the problem of gender pay inequality becomes less noticeable. However, the number of women who reach a level in their career growth where gender pay inequality is almost not observed is less than the number of men. Keywords: gender wage gap, unexplained part of gender wage gap, professions groups, inequality of access to high-paying work, energetics. JEL Classification J26, J16 Formulas: 0; fig.: 3; tabl.: 1; bibl.: 15.

УДК 37.014.543 Д. В. Верба, І. С. Верховод ДЕРЖАВНІ ОСВІТНІ ВИДАТКИ ТА ДОСТУПНІСТЬ ОСВІТИ ДЛЯ УКРАїНСЬКИХ ДОМОГОСПОДАРСТВ Анотація. Стаття містить апробацію аналітичних прийомів, призначених для оцінювання внеску бюджетних секторів соціальних галузей економіки в динаміку добробуту домогосподарств. Оцінено внесок бюджетного сектору освіти у добробут домогосподарств опосередковано: через динаміку попиту на комерційний сектор освіти. Вважаючи послуги комерційного і бюджетного секторів освіти щільно пов'язаними в процесі задоволення потреб домогосподарств, на прикладі України було досліджено відносини взаємозамінності й взаємодоповнюваності між благами, що постачають бюджетний і комерційний сектори освіти. Для цього було досліджено функціональний зв'язок між масштабами ресурсного забезпечення бюджетного сектору галузі і попитом на блага (товари і послуги), що постачає її комерційний сектор. Результати моделювання емпірично підтвердили здатність обмежувати темпи зростання цін на послуги освітньої галузі, розширення ресурсного забезпечення комерційного сектору і не виявили такої здатності у розширенні ресурсного забезпечення бюджетного сектору освіти. Виявлені ознаки того, що розширення ресурсного забезпечення бюджетного сектору освіти супроводжується зростанням тиску на ресурсні можливості комерційного сектору: спостерігається ефект витіснення, відомий у макроекономіці стосовно державних і приватних інвестицій. Ключові слова: соціальні галузі, освіта, бюджетні витрати, доступність благ, комерційний сектор, бюджетний сектор, масштаби споживання. Summary. The article contains a test of analytical techniques intended to assess the contribution of budgetary sectors of social sectors of the economy to the dynamics of household welfare. The article estimates the contribution of the budgetary education sector to the welfare of households indirectly: due to the dynamics of demand for the commercial education sector. Considering the services of the commercial and budgetary education sectors are tightly coupled in the process of meeting the needs of households, Ukraine has explored the interchangeability and complementarity relationships between the goods supplying the budgetary and commercial education sectors. To this end, a functional relationship was explored between the size of the sector's budgetary resources and the demand for goods (goods and services) supplied by its commercial sector. The simulation results have empirically confirmed the ability to limit the pace of price increases for educational services, expand the resource provision of the commercial sector, and have not shown such ability in expanding the resource provision of the budgetary education sector. Signs have been identified that the expansion of resource provision to the budgetary education sector is accompanied by an increase in pressure on the resources of the commercial sector: there is a crowding-out effect known in the macroeconomics regarding public and private investment.