Social needs and instruments for their satisfaction — public goods — have been studied. Attention is drawn to the fact that social needs are composed of individual and collective needs of economic entities. They are interrelated and complementary. An important difference between individual and collective needs is in their personification (individualization) and divisibility. Proper consideration has been paid to concepts related to the needs of society — the public interest (as a form of social needs), public goods (all the goods, services that can satisfy social needs). For studying social needs and benefits in this work there was taken one of the most popular of their classification, which lies in their division into primary and secondary ones. Emphasis is placed on importance of its use in determining the priority of financing public goods. The focus is on the approach to calculating the cost of public goods. It is regarded as one of the stages in satisfying social needs (along with planning and analysis of the degree for their satisfaction). An approach to determining the structure of financing the total volume of public goods, calculating minimum admissible and desired volume of financing has been presented. The current interest in the European experience prompted the authors to analyze the cost and structure of financing public goods in France, the available statistical base allowing it to be implemented. The determined dependence between the indicators enabled conducting calculations of the desired volumes of financing the public needs per person according to three scenarios: optimistic, satisfactory and critical relevant to phases of the economic cycle. This simulation is aimed at being used in management decisionmaking, development of social and economic policy, etc. There have been noted serious shortcomings related to the lack of quality and reliable statistical information on Ukraine, which hamper the calculation and consideration of foreign experience