Hromadas should invest in their economic development, attract small and medium-sized business, and encourage business entities to create jobs to serve the needs of the population at the expense of taxes, said Yuriy Tretyak, Technical Team Leader, Regional Development in Policy and Action, U-LEAD with Europe Programme, at the fifth meeting of the EU Committee of the Regions-Ukraine Task Force on Decentralisation.

“Today, when hromadas’ amalgamation is very active, when hromadas receive new powers, new resources, the key challenge is to use these resources efficiently not only to provide certain services to citizens, which is also very important, but first of all, to use these resources to attract new ones, that is, to promote the economic development of the hromada, attract new investors, both internal and external, in order to have new jobs in order to increase salaries on the ground. And, in fact, to pay for services, provided for the population, at the expense of these taxes on this new economic activity,” noted Yuriy Tretyak.

He recalled that, with the assistance of the U-LEAD with Europe Programme, 24 Local Government Development Centres were established, that provide advisory support to AHs in development strategy elaboration. MinRegion has also worked out the necessary methodological recommendations on the basis of which local self-government bodies can start strategic planning of the AH development.

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