THE MAIN CONTRADICTION OF CONSUMER MARKET RELATIONS AND WAYS TO OVERCOME IT

Abstract

In the context of European integration, Ukraine has committed itself to ensure a high level of consumer rights protection and to achieve consistency between consumer rights protection systems in Ukraine and the EU. First of all, this concerns the introduction of high standards of responsibility in the consumer sphere, which are currently valid in the EU, into domestic practice. Primarily, this concerns the improvement of the system of adequate economic responsibility of business for of consumer rights violation.
The main contradiction of consumer market is connected with the opposite of interests of its main subjects: business-producers (sellers), on the one hand, and the population, or end users of life’s goods – on the other. This contradiction is a system of relations that arise between interests of producers and sellers seeking to maximize personal profits and interests of the population, which seeks to meet personal needs for consumption of goods and services that are safe for health and life. Under certain conditions of disparity in implementation of private interests and inadequate economic responsibility of business for violating the consumer rights, this contradiction may become aggravated and turn into antagonistic one.
Today, legally fixed economic sanctions for cases of criminal violations of consumer rights are calculated by the normatively determined number of non-taxable minimum income of citizens. These sanctions from the point of view of their economic conformity with the losses incurred by end users, are completely unacceptable. Therefore, further use of the non-taxable minimum as a base value when determining the amount of economic sanctions for a criminal violation of consumer rights is inadmissible. At the same time, all other social and economic norms and standards, in particular, minimum wage, living wage, etc., cannot be used as a normative-base quantity (this is confirmed by domestic and world practice). Instead of the non-taxable minimum of citizens’ incomes, it is necessary to introduce a normative-base quantity, which in its essence is: (i) quantity of the scale-fixed value; (ii) determined on the basis of using the indicators of income base of the consolidated state budget and fixed in UAH terms; (iii) acting during the current fiscal year.