On addressing the problems of the mining towns in the Donetsk region

The paper summarizes the applied analysis results concerning some mining towns in the Donetsk region of the Ukraine, which, due to their mono-industrial orientation, have been severely hit by the coal-mining industry restructuring processes and appeared to get depressed. Such indicators of regional development, as constant population of the town, population natural growth rate, unemployment rate, the ratio of employment in industry to total employment, salaries in 2009 prices have been studied. The experience of such developed countries, as Germany, France, the USA, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Russia in overcoming the industrial towns' development negative trends has been analyzed, and a relevant set of measures has been suggested. Ukrainian legislation concerning stimulation of the territories' development has been studied. Existing problems of legal support to stimulation of the regional development have been defined. In order to be able to provide an unbiased evaluation of the mining towns' status, it has been offered to develop a set of indices taking into account the territory's ecological, economic, social and demographic specificity to enable the grounded choice of the criteria when assigning the "depressed" status to a town. There are given grounds to developing the innovation-based development strategy on the basis of a triangle "authorities - businesses - society" trying to eliminate the mono-industrial structure