Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 17th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview V. Working Group on Public Sector Finance and Accounting Author(s) Sergii Slukhai Taras Shevchenko National University Kyiv Ukraine Bovsunivska Iryna, Sokrovolska Natalia Title Do municipal assets need more effective management? (Case of Ukraine) File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract In order to perform the functions prescribed by the legislation, Ukrainian municipalities are endowed with some public assets. They run secondary education establishments, general hospitals, sports and culture facilities. But the fact is that the functions delivered by these facilities belong to the domain of the central government, which, according to the Constitution, has to provide the population with such goods as secondary education, health care etc. To do so, it runs field departments responsible for education, health care, social care, and culture which use municipal property without being formally accountable to a local community. Such a situation gives rise to the following question: who is the actual owner of the communal property: the state or the local community? The second question arises from the wide-spread situation when communal assets are used in order to make richer some private persons who have a grip on certain assets. The problem is that under conditions of low development of the civil society institutions, on the municipal level the situation of the so called ‘state capture’ is often the case. That is why one could ask: how effective is the current model of municipal property management and whether community has any possibility to influence decision making concerning property transfers and utilization? In order to answer these questions, the paper will give a brief outline of the historic origin of municipal property formation in Ukraine, its legal regulation and actual state (composition, management etc.). The plan is to use statistical data provided by Association of Ukrainian Cities and State Department of Statistics. The case study will deal with data on municipal property in big cities of national and regional significance (to be chosen depending on statistical data available, tentatively Kyiv – national capital – and Ivano-Frankivsk). In order to have an idea of the public perception concerning asset management in a respective city, a questionnaire for citizens will be developed and disseminated. Its results could bring some insights into the public attitude concerning the local administration of municipal assets. The focus will be set on municipal property management issues in a separate city: its formation, development, privatization, contracting-out, incentives for administrators, accountability etc. The aim is to understand whether local governments are able to effectively use and develop factors in their possession for the sake of the local community. As an outcome of the study, recommendations will be formulated concerning the elimination of legal inconsistencies and the introduction of institutional improvements on the community level.
