F00 - International Economics: GeneralReturn

The first objective of this paper is to briefly describe and compare the methodology of the two best known international rankings of competitiveness (World Competitiveness Yearbook and The Global Competitiveness Report). The method of construction of these scoreboards (proportion of hard and soft data, form of their aggregation, choice of respondents, etc.) does not make it possible to find a satisfactory answer to the question whether national competitiveness is objectively measurable. The second goal of this paper is to analyse the V4 results in these rankings. According to the GCR all the V4 are most successful in indicators called Efficiency enhancers. The low trust in the political representation and its activities is typical for the V4 countries. This negative attitude is projected into negative evaluation of the quality of public institutions and public administration.

Increases in the technological sophistication of some emerging economies, linked, in part, to shifts in the distribution of innovation activities from developed to emerging economies has attracted a lot of attention. Whether emerging economies will catch up with developed regions in terms of innovation and technology remains an open question. Various methods can be used to measure the technological capacity of an economy, though most suffer from a number of significant problems. In this paper, I present a relatively new measure of a country's technological sophistication based upon the goods that it exports. The empirical analysis focuses on exports to the European Union over the period 1990-2009. Special attention is paid to China, which has made a huge progress in technology and innovations in the past years. Based on this analysis, China's technological capabilities correspond with its income level and thus China does not seem to threaten the technological position of the EU yet.