ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES AND DEVELOPMENT ZONES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION (original) (raw)
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The starting point is the investigation of competitiveness -resource and measure of development within the context of internationalization and globalization of the world economy. At the regional level, competitiveness must capture the distinguishing features that influence the overall competitiveness of the economic agents located in a certain region, despite the usual mix of highly and less competitive economic agents. Such features might comprise, among others, social and physical infrastructure, labor skills and public institutions' efficiency. Defining the regional competitiveness and correct identification of its determinants may be achieved in different manners -either adaptations for the regional level of the definitions of macroeconomic or microeconomic competitiveness are attempted and the corresponding determinants are identified, or other ways to "deal with" the notion and to identify and, eventually, to aggregate the corresponding determinants are pursued.
Competitiveness is closely connected with the ability of firm, subsector or country to sell and supply goods and services in a given market, in relation to the ability and performance of other firms, sub-sectors or countries in the same market. This term is usually used in relation with firms or countries, but for the better insight into national competitiveness is necessary to analyze this phenomenon on the level of regions. Presented paper is focused on the competitiveness analysis of the NUTS 2 regions in the countries of European Union. Analysis was determined by availability of necessary data. According to Regional Index of Competitiveness was selected 18 variables for the period of the year 2011 which were latest available data. Analysis included only regions for which were available all the variables in selected period of time, which were 210 European NUTS 2 regions. (Analysis exclude France and some of the Greece, Austrian, German and UK regions). The main aim of paper was comparison of EU regions through number of variables with a focus on Regional Index of Competitiveness. First, all regions were described and compared within selected variables. Then was derived weights for each individual variable using correlation matrix, and the final step of the analysis was construction of the Index which measure competitiveness with respect to the selected indicators. Then, regions were sorted into groups according to the value of constructed indicator. Average value of the constructed index of competitiveness was 0.46 with standard deviation 0.15. Variability measured using coefficient of variation was 32.95 %. The value of median was 0.489 which was slightly over the mean. Distribution of the values in the analyzed group of regions was slightly skewed to the right, which means that most of the regions performed over
A MODEL TO EVALUATE THE REGIONAL COMPETITIVENESS OF THE EU
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The starting point is the investigation of competitiveness -resource and measure of development within the context of internationalization and globalization of the world economy. At the regional level, competitiveness must capture the distinguishing features that influence the overall competitiveness of the economic agents located in a certain region, despite the usual mix of highly and less competitive economic agents. Such features might comprise, among others, social and physical infrastructure, labor skills and public institutions' efficiency. Defining the regional competitiveness and correct identification of its determinants may be achieved in different manners -either adaptations for the regional level of the definitions of macroeconomic or microeconomic competitiveness are attempted and the corresponding determinants are identified, or other ways to "deal with" the notion and to identify and, eventually, to aggregate the corresponding determinants are pursued.
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The concept of competitiveness has been largely discussed over the last decades. A broad notion of competitiveness refers to the inclination and skills to compete, to win and retain position in the market, increasing market share and profitability, thus, being commercially successful. The concept of regional competitiveness which has gained more and more attention in recent years, mostly due to the increased attention given to regions as key in the organization and governance of economic growth and the creation of wealth. An important example is the special issue of Regional Studies, published in 2004, fully devoted to the concept of competitiveness of regions. Regional competitiveness is not only an issue of academic interest but of increasing policy deliberation and action. This is reflected in the interest devoted in the recent years by the European Commission to define and evaluate competitiveness of European regions, an objective closely related to the realization of the Lisbon Strategy on Growth and Jobs. Why measuring regional competitiveness is so important? Because “if you can not measure it, you can not improve it” (Lord Kelvin). A quantitative score of competitiveness will help Member States in identifying possible regional weaknesses together with factors mainly driving these weaknesses. This in turn will assist regions in the catching up process. Given the multidimensional nature of the competitiveness concept, the structure of RCI is made of eleven pillars which describe the concept, taking into account its regional dimension, with particular focus on a region’s potential. The long-term perspective is, in fact, essential for European policy and people’s skills are understood to play a key role for EU future, as also underlined by the president of the Lisbon Council in his recent policy brief. For this reason the RCI includes aspects related to short and long-term capabilities of regions, with a special focus on innovation, higher education, lifelong learning and technological availability and use, both at the individual and at the enterprise level. A number of indicators have been selected to describe these dimensions with criteria based on coverage and comparability as well as within pillar statistical coherence. Most indicators come from Eurostat but where data was not available, alternative source were considered. A detailed univariate and multivariate statistical analyses have been carried out on the set of candidate indicators for the setting-up and refinement of the composite. Each choice with a certain degree of uncertainty has been submitted to a full robustness analysis to evaluate the level of variability of regions final score and ranking. The final RCI shows a heterogeneous situation across EU regions with Eastern and Southern European regions showing lower performance while more competitive regions are observed in Northern Europe and parts of Continental Europe.
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