The paper presents the theoretical and methodological foundations of Ukraine's state legislation regulating the economic development of territories, in the context of budget decentralization. The study also describes the transformation of the public administration system necessitated by the above-mentioned phenomenon. The authors discuss the basic methods by which the state can regulate the activity of local self-government bodies: the legislative regulation, where the intervention of public authorities is minimized, and the administrative regulation, which provides rules and instructions which determine the relations between central and local authorities. The authors conduct and describe a methodologically consistent, systematic analysis of state regulations which support the local self-governments' activity. The paper also discusses the recent economic changes in Ukraine which demonstrate that the reform of the local self-government system and the decentralization of authority entail both prospects and problems for the country's development. As might be expected, the authors focus particularly on those problems that have not been solved yet. Additionally, statistical estimations of the phenomena relating to the process of producing state legislation regulating the economic development of territories in the context of budgetary decentralization have been provided. The authors conclude that a successful territorial development strategy requires a joint transformation of the way of the society's thinking and the modernisation of both the Ukrainian business and the state.

The approach to study the significance of trade relations between countries by analysing economic vulnerability, economic sensitivity, symmetry and asymmetry of the established economic links is proposed in the paper. This approach is adapted to an analysis of the trade dependence of Ukraine. The estimated interdependence ratios for Ukraine and its largest trade partners -the EU, the Russian Federation, post-Soviet countries, China, the USA and Brazil and India as emerging economies -are compared with the respective ratios of Ukraine's dependence on these countries' markets. The analysed dynamics of Ukraine's GDP dependence on Ukraine's trade partners shows a growing relative weight of the countries that have not had a substantial role in the foreign trade of Ukraine. The proposed approach for estimating the quality of the established trade relations is supposed to contribute to the radical transformation of Ukraine's foreign trade.

The present article illustrates the use of integrated indices to evaluate the potential for the development of regional integration processes. The study examines a new research and methodological approach, which involves the use of an integral index of the potential for the development of integration processes, proposed with regard to the intensity of the influence of internal and external factors on integrative relations development. The application of the above-mentioned integrated index in a comparative analysis of the potential for the development of integration processes allows a comprehensive and quantitative description of the current regional integration processes taking place in the modern economy under certain regional models.