Introduction
The concept of sustainable development is
considered to be one of the dominant ideas of the
XXI century. Its appearance was a consequence
of the world community’s awareness of the need
to ensure the coherence of current and future
generations’ interests in a way that the economic
growth should take place taking into account the
fundamental limitations of existing resources and
the importance of harmonizing the links between
ecological, economic and social systems.
Since the signing of the association agreement
with the European Union in 2014 and receiving
the status of a candidate for EU membership in
2022, Ukraine has started to join the
implementation of sustainable development
concept priorities and the observation system of
their realization. In this context, the problem of
evaluating and monitoring resource productivity,
which is implemented in the practice of the EU,
becomes extremely relevant. We should also note
that the issue of productivity is constantly in the
field of European science view and practice. To
improve the existing methods of assessing
resource productivity and deepening knowledge
in the field of resource use and its impact on the
environment, OECD countries have prepared a
number of recommendations for increasing
resource productivity. In addition, the
organization emphasized its positive attitude to
the experience exchange in matters of resource
productivity with countries that are not OECD
members. At the same time, the mentioned
recommendations concerned only those natural
resources whose production, processing, and
usage have international importance from an
ecological and economic point of view, in
particular non-metallic minerals, ores, and
biomass (OECD, 2008a). Besides, the G7
countries defined an action plan for the
implementation of the so-called 3R initiative -
reduce, reuse, recycle - which provided for the
reduction of resource consumption, their reuse
and recycling. The 3R policy is one of the steps
aimed at achieving the so-called decoupling, i.e.
breaking the linear relationship between
economic growth and the number of resources
used (G7 Information Centre, 2008). This is
extremely important because ensuring
sustainable development involves maximizing
resource productivity while minimizing resource
intensity. Thus, the productivity of using
resource potential is one of the key indicators of
sustainable development (Zablodska et al., 2020;
Shults et al., 2021, Prytula et al 2021).
The full-scale armed aggression of the Russian
Federation has caused significant destruction of
production facilities as well as infrastructural and
logistics facilities and provoked a number of
restrictions on Ukraine and the economic
development of its regions. These will exacerbate
the resource productivity issue. Under the current
circumstances, European experience will be
useful for Ukraine from the point of view of
identifying and improving existing approaches to
resource productivity assessment. Adaptation of
the methodological approaches of the EU
member states in Ukraine and conducting
domestic scientific research on the
modernization of the methods for assessing
resource productivity use is an important and
timely task for Ukrainian science.
Methods review
The evaluation of resource productivity in the EU
is carried out by the European Commission,
which conducts annual monitoring of this
indicator based on Eurostat data using methods
unified for all EU member states. A similar
approach to calculating resource productivity is
also used by the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development. The only
difference between these methods is the
constituent components that are included in the
biomass. While in the EU this category includes
materials of organic origin used for the
production of biofuel, in the OECD, biomass
includes agricultural crops used in the food
industry and agriculture, including feed (Eurostat
Statisctics Explained, 2023a; OECD, 2015).
According to the specified method, a resource
productivity indicator is calculated according to
formula 1:
RP = GDP
DMC + import - export (1)
where GDP is gross domestic product, DMC is
domestic material consumption, while imports
and exports are calculated in physical measures
(OECD 2008a, Eurostat Statisctics Explained
2023b).
With the aim of comparing EU member states by
the level of resource productivity and eliminating
the difference between national currencies,
calculations are presented in the purchasing
power standard (PPS) per kilogram. DMC
calculation is carried out for such main categories
of resources as ores, fossil energy materials,