ASSESSMENT OF ECONOMIC SECURITY FACTORS OF UKRAINE'S ENERGY MARKET TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED EUROPEAN AREA

Abstract

The purpose of the article is the evaluation of the economic security factors of Ukraine’s electricity market under conditions of its integration into the European energy area. The implementation of the competitive electricity market model according to the European integration requirements creates transformational challenges for the system of economic interests of energy market participants and their interrelationship. Therefore, the importance of the timely identification and response to economic security factors that may increase the vulnerability of each of the electricity market subjects during the period of structural market adjustment is updated. The research is based on the competitive electricity market model that evolves under the influence of the European integration process. During the course of the present paper, the author has assessed the weight of the economic security factors for Ukraine’s electricity market participants by using an expert evaluation method. Moreover, the statistical method and comparative analysis have been used to investigate the main indicators that reflect the conditions of national electricity markets functioning in the context of economic security were analyzed. In the process of presenting the research results, the authors considered notions of the electricity market and the energy market as fully interchangeable, i.e. synonymous, in order to avoid tautology. In the article, based on the application of the expert evaluation method, subjective and functional structuring of the economic security factors of the Ukrainian energy market was carried out by ranking the weight of their influence on all its participants. The main indicators reflecting the conditions of national electricity markets functioning in the context of economic security were analyzed. Considering the key trends and requirements of the EU energy legislation, the economic security factors were grouped into functional categories, including technical and technological, organizational, informational, financial and economic, fuel and power, environmental, and as well as political and legal factors. Based on the expert evaluation, a map of economic security factors of electricity market participants was formed. It was determined that under conditions of the energy market transformation, organizational factors have the greatest impact on the level of economic security of all its participants. It was found that the most vulnerable among other subjects of the energy market are electricity producers. The scientific novelty of this study is the subject and functional structuring of the economic security factors based on the ranking weight of their impact on all its participants. This provides the possibility to identify and prioritize strategic directions of increasing the level of economic security taking into account the vulnerability of its participants to the manifestation of functional ones. The practical significance of the obtained results is that the structuring of the economic security factors can be used by regulatory authorities in identifying and prioritizing the strategic directions to improve the economic security level of the electricity market in the terms of European integration.