The decision on the exemplary accreditation of the study program of the level of Doctor of Philosophy in the major "Economics" was made on November 17^th at a meeting of the National Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.

Among the innovative and exemplary practices of SumDU educational activity under this study program, noted by experts, are:

• experience in recognizing learning outcomes obtained during the international internship program;
• clear rules for enrolling learning outcomes obtained in non-formal education;
• distance learning methods were typical for the study program even before the introduction of quarantine measures in Ukraine;
• the practice of participation of research supervisors of postgraduate students in research projects (in 2016-2020 at the departments where research supervisors of postgraduate students carried out more than 30 research works), including 10 state budget research works and expert works within agreements with local governments);
• the amount of funding for research works performed by scientists involved in the study program, in the period of 2016-2020 amounted to self-supporting issues - UAH 1.87 million, and the state budget - almost UAH 5 million;
• based on the results of research works in the period of 2016-2019 in this scientific area received more than 30 security documents for various methods and their automation, including with the participation of postgraduate students;
• five teachers of the study program are members of the editorial boards of foreign publications, which are indexed by the databases Scopus, WoS. At the basic department, 4 teachers work as editors of such magazines and have prepared 3 special issues of Scopus / WoS magazines of the Swiss publishing house Inderscience Publishers, starting from 2018;
• high publishing activity of scientific and pedagogical staff of the study program, also in journals included in the scientometric databases Scopus and Web of Science, as well as high citation indexes in these databases;
• a training format that not only imitates real conditions but actually provides conditions and support for expert teachers in relevant fields at the stages of preparation, promotion, presentation and implementation of real research projects, applications for funding, preparation and review of scientific articles;
• publications of postgraduate students abroad, also in publications included in the scientometric databases Scopus and/or Web of Science;
• involvement in the educational process of foreign scientists and professionals from the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Belgium, etc.;
• the functioning of the Center for Human Resources Development of the educational institution in HEI (training of SumDU scientific and pedagogical workers there is free) and introduction of a cumulative system of advanced training;
• SumDU repository according to the Webometrics Transparent Ranking of Repositories ranked 35^th among all world repositories, 29^th among institutional repositories of the world, and 1^st among Ukrainian repositories in terms of the number of documents indexed by Google Scholar. In 2019, SumDU Library became the winner in the nomination "Large Libraries" of the competition "Library of the Year 2019" of the Ukrainian Library Association, for the implementation of projects "Reading changes us and everything around" and "Green Library".

An exemplary level of accreditation is assigned to a study program that has an innovative and model character.