Natural Resource Systems and their Impact on the Economic Development of Ukraine
To assess the impact of natural resource systems (natural resources in general, land and forestry in particular) on the development of Ukraine’s economy the authors calculated the separate elasticity of growth factors, which are the labor (number of employees), physical capital (value of fixed assets) and natural capital. All results are based on the Cobb - Douglas production function in logarithmic form. Depending on the influence level of the functioning effects of natural resource systems (high, medium, low) the authors divided Ukraine’s regions into three groups. This impact assessment of integrated resource potential (natural resource systems) gives a more optimistic result than the results of its components (land and forestry complexes). In the first case there are 6 regions in the group with low impact, whereas in the second case - 10 and 14 regions, respectively.