Financial Self-Sufficiency of Territorial Communities: Theoretical Discourse

Introduction. The decentralization processes have updated the need to solve two interdependent tasks: to substantiate the role of local governments in meeting the needs of the population and thus determine public goods that have to be secured at the level of territorial communities, regions, and the country and sources of financial resources for their provision; to outline the ways of territorial communities’ development in a long run and achievement of their self-sufficiency as an efficiency criterion of administrative-territorial reform. For that matter, the substantiation of theoretical foundations of territorial communities’ self-sufficiency is an important scientific task. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the theoretical foundations of territorial communities’ financial self-sufficiency and determine its place in the structure of communities’ self-sufficiency. Methods. The methods of dialectical analysis, synthesis, and logical generalization, as well as comparison and formalization, were used in the research. Results. The nature of the territorial community concept is defined and its economic features are outlined. The theoretical foundations of territorial communities’ financial self-sufficiency are examined and on this basis, the definition is interpreted considering the interrelated concepts of socio-economic systems’ self-sufficiency and territorial communities’ self-sufficiency. A territorial community is financially self-sufficient if its financial system is characterized by self-reliance in conditions of vertical integration into the system of public finance, and if it is capable to maintain and/or improve the achieved development level and secure normativity of providing social goods to the population due to efficient use of financial tools under the impact of external and internal factors. The paper emphasized the role of vertical integration of the community’s financial system with the system of public finance and the top priority of internal capacity to develop in the community for achievement of financial self-sufficiency. It also substantiates the need to determine the normativity of public goods provision to the population in the process of the use of financial tools.