Employment in rural areas is formed by the production and activities of various industries. The main institution of employment formation is agriculture, where more than half of the population of rural areas is employed. The increase in labor productivity in agricultural enterprises of the Odesa region does not have a decreasing effect on the level of employment in agarian production in the region. The key factor in reducing the number of people employed in the public sector of agricultural production in Odesa is the decrease in the number of economic entities.
 The purpose of this article is to study of the peculiarities of the development of agriculture in the Odesa region. In order to achieve the defined goal and in accordance with the logic of scientific research, the following tasks were set: determination of the share of the main districts of Odesa region in the structure of agricultural production in the region, analysis of the level of population employment in the main branches of agriculture.
 In the structure of agricultural enterprises of the Odesa region, farms are the dominant organizational and legal form of business; in the reporting period, their share was 73.6%. However, the absolute and relative indicators of the number of farms are decreasing over the past 7 years, their absolute number has decreased by almost 1,000 units from 4,038 in 2014 to 3081 in 2020. Along with agricultural enterprises, an equally important employer that belongs to the category of agrarian entrepreneurship and complements the relevant institution of employment are rural households (households of the population).
 The functioning and development of employment institutes in rural areas of the Odesa region is a complex and multifaceted process. It depends on many conditions and factors: territorial location of the united community; branch structure of social production and local economic traditions; the number of economic entities, primarily those that use hired labor; sex-age structure of the population; the distance to the nearest urban settlements and the number of vacant jobs in them; the level of self-organization of the residents of the united community, their readiness to take an active part in ensuring the socio-economic development of the rural territory belonging to them; qualitative characteristics of local self-government bodies, the effectiveness of their management functions, the initiative of heads of territorial communities.
Read full abstract