Nepytaliuk A. The demographic sustainability strategy’s preparation in Ukraine under conditions of globalization

The dissertation is devoted to the problems of the theoretical foundations’ deepening, the methodological provisions’ refinement, and the certain applied recommendations’ preparation for the demographic sustainability strategy’s preparation in Ukraine under conditions of globalization. The scientific novelty of the obtained results is associated with the conceptual substantiation of the demographic sustainability strategy’s preparation under conditions of globalization, and essential improvement in the theoretical and methodological assessment apparatus of the socio-demographic factors’ impact on the economic development dynamics. In the first section “Theoretical and methodological principles of demographic sustainability” the approaches to the interpretation of “demographic sustainability” are analyzed and summarized. The aforementioned category has got the author’s definition. Demographic sustainability is the society’s ability to support automatically and – using both implicit and explicit compensators – to restore as well as to improve its own structure in the context of social stratification, regarding a set of significant parameters, including the economic activity level as well as educational, professional and competence training; demographic sustainability optimizes the production proportions of intellectual and physical capital, provides intensification and continuity of production, increases the population welfare. It was substantiated that the complex of demographic factors, in particular the dynamics of population size and density, the share of economically active persons in its structure, fertility (current and retrospective) and mortality rates, average life expectancy, influenced a long-term economic growth. In the second section “The empirical study of the Ukrainian population’s socio-demographic characteristics” the population’s decline over the 1990–2020 period by more than 10 million people was derived from a set of natural factors and an imperfect and insufficiently systematic and consistent government economic policy as well. It is proved that the demographic policy’s priorities should be associated with an increase in the life expectancy; a reduction in all population age strata mortality (e. g., in the working age population stratum, in the juvenile stratum, etc.). The outflow of the youth should be counteracted in order to minimize the negative impact on production and reproductive potential. The Ukrainian socio-demographic policy’s implementation peculiarities are represented by the lack of effective tools to impact both natural and migration population increase, critically prolonged and rather uncoordinated the national economy’s structural transformations, a significant development inequality in the regional context, and mixed social sectors’ funding involving private and public resources. An updated approach to investigate the effects of demographic factors on economic growth was applied. In the third section “Development of the governmental demographic strategy in the context of globalization” the necessity of improvements in the mechanism and the analytical tools for assessing the demographic factors’ impact on economic growth (involving econometric methods) was sustained. Meanwhile, the population aging could be a source for the second demographic dividend rather than an economic decline. In terms of the economically productive population stratum decline, the major challenge for the aging and aged societies is to provide a favorable framework for the specific old-age consumption and to achieve a desirable level of public welfare. The second demographic dividend gained through the intensified accumulation of human intellectual capital and the rationalized structure of savings and investments was identified as a priority. It was proved that the demographic development policy should be based on the optimal model of mixed public and private human capital funding. The category of “productive public expenditures” ensuring demographic sustainability was refined; the role of private investments aimed at human capital accumulation was outlined. It was highlighted that the ongoing shifts in the demographic structure could enable the national economy to convert most of the benefits from factor accumulation and technological changes into income per capita growth.