REGULATION OF THE NATURAL MONOPOLY MARKET IN THE CONDITIONS OF THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY

Abstract

The next breakthrough of today's era is based on the transition to a new type of organization of social production, namely Industry 5.0. This transition should be ensured by the knowledge economy. The liberal nature of the knowledge economy generates discussions about the expediency of the existence of natural monopolies. The work revealed that today the majority of research in the field of natural monopolies is devoted to the study of their origin, essence, classification, and regulation methods. However, there are almost no hypotheses regarding the transformation of these markets in the conditions of the knowledge economy. This fact indicates the relevance of the article. The purpose of the article is to develop a mechanism for state regulation of the natural monopoly market, taking into account the specific features of the external environment of the knowledge economy, in particular: the expansion of state cooperation; the growing influence of science on the formation of socio-economic relations; the accelerated exchange of knowledge in the global space; a high level of public control over public spending; formation of global information space; easy mobility of highly qualified workforce and labor concentration in large cities; increasing the knowledge intensity of products, intellectualization of processes; partial deprivation of the economy of limited resources; the possibility of mastering sales in various regional markets; the possibility of minimizing transaction costs. The study examines the approaches of various authors to the definition of natural monopoly; own interpretation of this definition is formulated; the characteristic features of the knowledge economy and the digital economy are outlined; the author's definition of the concept of knowledge economy is provided; specific features of the external environment of the knowledge economy were formulated based on the identification of the elements of the knowledge economy; a mechanism of state regulation of the activity of natural monopolies has been developed under the specified conditions. The following methods were used in the research process: analysis and synthesis, statistical, economic and comparative analysis.