State social standards, guarantees and their provision in Ukraine

Abstract

The relevance of the study is due to the inconsistency of living standards with standard norms and guarantees. In order to assess the standard of living in the region, to develop and implement regional social programs, to determine the right to receive social assistance financed from local budgets, local governments may approve a regional subsistence level not lower than the established one. The article considers the problems of ensuring the implementation of state social guarantees in Ukraine as the basis of state social policy. The social security legislation of Ukraine gives the following definition of state social guarantees – these are the minimum amounts of wages, incomes, pensions, social assistance, other types of social benefits established by laws and other regulations that ensure the standard of living not lower than the subsistence level. The concepts of standards, norms, social guarantees and their relationship are compared to each other, as well as ways of their observance and implementation. Ukrainian legislation and social standards set minimum consumption standards that do not meet all the needs of modern human for a sufficient living standard. To confirm this hypothesis, a comparative analysis of the minimum monthly wage in Ukraine and EU countries was conducted. The paper identifies that there are several methods in the world that determine the subsistence level, in particular: statistical, resource, relative, sociological, normative, combined. It was also found that the existence of norms in the legislation does not ensure their automatic implementation and requires adjustment of state mechanisms to ensure their implementation. It has been established that in the conditions of the started processes of integration into the European community, in the conditions when the prices in Ukraine have already reached the European level, and some even exceed them, the issues of revision of social standards, social guarantees and mechanisms of public administration to ensure them become more relevant. The study found that the minimum wage in Bulgaria is twice as high as in Ukraine. In some EU member states, there is no concept of a minimum wage. Social standards should reflect the desired living standard of the population of each country in a given period of its development. Social standards for all countries cannot be the same, because each country has its own idea of a decent living standard. The practical significance of the article is to provide proposals for adjusting the state regulation of the processes providing the population with social guarantees in Ukraine.