Competitiveness, Innovation and Regional Development. The Case of the Visegrad Group Countries

The article examines the competitiveness and innovativeness of 35 NUTS-2 Visegrad regions from 2001 to 2008, with a focus on the existence of clusters. The author undertakes to identify the most competitive and innovative clusters. She also looks at the impact of nationality and checks if high competitiveness was in each case accompanied by high innovativeness. The author applies two classical methods of cluster analysis: the non-hierarchical k-means clustering algorithm and Ward’s hierarchical method. The results show that capital regions tend to develop faster and that there is a significant diversity of regional competitiveness and innovativeness across the Visegrad Group, which brings together four Central European countries, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. The main conclusion from the cluster analysis is that the development of regions in Visegrad Group countries depends on their “nationality” – regions tend to cluster within national borders, according to Golejewska. The analysis shows that this process intensified in 2008, so it is not a vestige of the previous system, the author says. The correlation analysis found that innovative inputs were transformed into innovative outputs and that innovations had a positive and growing impact on regional competitiveness across the Visegrad Group. However, further input-output analysis and econometric research are needed to confirm these findings, the author says.