IT CLUSTERS IN UKRAINE: ECONOMIC POTENTIAL

Abstract

As an organizational form of economic relations, clusters play a key role in development projects of the regions of Ukraine. Traditionally, industrial, agrarian, tourist, logistic and trade clusters predominate in the general structure of national clusters. However, such a structure is a real indicator of the technological diversity of Ukrainian economy at the level of restrained development. At the same time, high-tech IT clusters of various organizational configurations become guarantors of timely innovative modernization and sustainable economic growth.
There are almost no programs for the development of information technology at the regional level in Ukraine. This significantly limits access of IT clusters to necessary resources, in particular, to financial, intellectual and social capital. This problem is especially acute in the framework of budgetary decentralization, when, taking into account the economic and social inconsistency of the regions to their own self-reproduction, priority of the development of IT clusters and high-tech industries in general is lost.
In the course of the study, the following results and conclusions were drawn: changes in financial and economic nature are substantially related to the macroeconomic level and should be defined in the national policy of clusterization development. It is necessary to: (i) actively implement budget decentralization, which will increase the financial participation of local governments in the development of infrastructure projects of IT clusters; (ii) weaken tax pressure on small and medium-sized IT companies by providing a tax investment loan that involves delaying the payment of income tax for a specified period; (iii) develop a system of guarantees for IT companies involved in projects of public interest, in particular, in attracting external loans for the creation of new infrastructure objects; (iv) use the mechanism of “real custom duty” to recover the cost of investment.