Abstract:

Nowadays, competitiveness and research activities are considered to be one of the main drivers of economic growth and creation of modern knowledge based economy. The main aim of this paper is to reveal the potential relations between the R&D expenditure and the competitiveness and innovation activity development in the V4 countries. This article is primarily focused on the development analysis of the following indexes – the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), World Competitiveness Index (WCI) and Global Innovation Index (GII) over the period of 2011- 2016. Secondary data was drawn from the publicly available reports of the above mentioned indexes compiled annually. On the other hand, secondary data concerning the gross domestic expenditure on R&D (GERD) by sectors of performance over the period 2011 - 2016, were retrieved from the Eurostat database. By using the correlation and regression analysis, we focused on the detection of interrelations between the R&D expenditure per capita (by using four variables of GERD) and values of the overall GCI, WCI and GII indicators. The medium and large correlation (using Kendall tau) between the total R&D expenditure per capita and relevant variables of GERD and innovation activity development using the GII indicator was confirmed (p < 0.01). The results suggested that the growth of R&D expenditure can significantly contribute to increasing the V4 countries' competitiveness and innovation activity level.