Abstract

This article presents the tendencies of the social development in Ukraine as a socio-territorial system. The demographic trends and tendencies of internal migration in Ukraine are considered from the perspective of the center-peripheral approach. The concept of the peripherization in Ukraine as well as the centralization of human resources is disclosed. As a result of the analysis of these outstanding trends, it was established that the center acts as an exploiter of regional human resources that at the same time creates additional risks of the regional development. The authors determine basic social mechanisms of regions peripherization. These include mainly the demographic degradation of the regions, what is reflected in the population reduction as a consequence of the negative natural population growth and migration which is concentrated around the center and the semiperiphery. It is revealed that the internal migration movement manifests itself in two main forms: educational migration and labor migration. The educational migration in Ukraine is aimed at a small number of university centers, where the largest is the city of Kyiv. Therefore, despite the negative balance of the educational migration rates in most oblasts, Kyiv accumulates the largest amount of university entrants. It was also established that educational migration has not only quantitative but also a qualitative dimension. This is how the center primarily concentrates the most successful students. All listed causes a significant imbalance in the distribution of the intellectual potential of the country in favor for the center and increases its competitiveness regarding to the regions. The maintenance and the reproduction of this situation is also supported by the system of the scholarships distribution in Ukrainian Institutions of Higher Education. The similar migration trends are also observed in the labor sphere, what creates additional risks for the economic development of the regions. The tendencies for concentration of the national labor and intellectual potential in the center are denoted by the human resources centralization concept where this type of resources becomes the main interest, exploited by the center. As a consequence, we get the transformation of regions into the internal periphery of Ukraine. This process occurs unequally, depending on the basic competitive position of the region and its integration into the general socio-territorial structure. This is especially relevant for areas that are in or close to the military conflict zone. According to the main results of the research, there were outlined the following vectors for scientific elaboration: designing the criteria to escribe territories to the zones of the semi-periphery and periphery; further in-depth studying of peripherization mechanisms; defining ways to overcome the imbalances in the development of Ukraine as a socio-territorial integrity.