Problems and Priorities of the “Lower Duna” European Region Development Under the European Union Expansion

Abstract

It is presented how European integration provides new opportunities for Ukraine and its
regions. At the same time, the integration of Ukraine into the European economic space requires the
elaboration of its own competitive strategy for each of the cross-border regions, ensuring the formation
of appropriate public ideology of their competitiveness. Cross-border cooperation is too slowly
adapting to the fundamentally new geo-economic conditions that have emerged since the enlargement
of the European Union and the direct approximation of EU borders to Ukraine. The cluster structure of
the cross-border region economy – it is ensuring the sustainable development of socio-economic
processes and increasing the competitiveness, attractiveness of the region for further investments.
Cluster development as a factor of increasing regional competitiveness is a characteristic feature of a
modern innovation economy. On the way to Ukraine's accession to the EU, the experience of European
cross-border cooperation as a preliminary and complementary stage of regional integration is
generalized. The necessity to develop and implement a cross-border strategy for the development of the
Euroregions, taking into account the European experience of transregional strategying, which object is
the sustainable socio-economic development of the Euroregional system in the unity of its human,
natural-resource, production potentials on the basis of network clusters, is presented.