No abstract

SMEs are the most dynamic and vibrant part of the enterprise sector in terms of start-ups and new jobs, and a significant share of the EU?s total innovation activities take place within them. This paper uses the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) 2014 and eCORDA data to analyse whether SME participation in EU research and innovation (R&I) funding programmes has increased their innovation activities and business performance. To achieve this, we empirically test whether SMEs that received EU funds recorded an improvement in their innovation and economic performance. This is measured by research and development (R&D) expenditure, product innovation, turnover, and employment. The paper focusses particularly on new EU member countries and among them to those from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It explores the theoretical and methodological backgrounds that guided us in these analyses and performs treatment effect analysis at firm level, using CIS CDROM data that we received on request from Eurostat. The obtained results indicate that EU R&I funding is beneficial to the innovation activities of SME recipients, and to their overall business performance. It also assists new EU member states in the process of ?catching up? to the growth levels of more established EU economies.

The Innovation Union flagship initiative, with its accompanying policies and actions, strives to ensure stronger involvement of SMEs in EU R&I programs.The main idea behind this paper is to review and discuss the impacts of SMEs' participation in EU R&D programs as a way of boosting their innovation activities. The paper addresses several research questions that help us to present the effects of increased availability of EU R&D funding on boosting innovation activities of SMEs across EU. We start by examining the current innovation performance of EU SMEs based on selected descriptive statistics and indicators.After that, we turn to elaborating the empirical and theoretical foundations and rationale for increased public funding through the EU R&D programs targeting SMEs. Then we discuss the impact of FP7, CIP, Eurostars, and Horizon 2020 funding on SME recipients. We briefly survey the results of available empirical studies that use both quantitative and qualitative evidence, and examine their outcomes in terms of direct and indirect impacts on innovation activities in EU member state SMEs. The examined empirical evidence points to several positive effects of participating in EU R&D programs on incentivizing innovation activities, output, and performance of recipient SMEs.

Although both theoretically and methodologically controversial, measuring competitiveness at sub-national level remains an exciting challenge for analysts. The paper starts with the review of the recent theoretical and empirical literature on regional competitiveness in the European Union, followed by empirical analysis of competitiveness of Croatian regions, tackling differences between the hard data and the survey data as well as clustering the Croatian regions based on their main competitive strengths and weaknesses.

The paper investigates changes in institutional quality in countries at different stages of European integration over the seven-year period from 2004-11. It analyses two countries of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) region, two from the Western Balkans and two EU Member States from South East Europe. The analysis reveals differences between the country groups in the extent of institutional convergence, in perceptions of corruption and in the pace of democratic consolidation. Analysis of changes in a newly constructed index of institutional quality in the public sector reveals a further falling behind the EU in some key dimensions. We conclude that the EU did not play an important role as a 'transformative power' in the two ENP countries over the period up to 2012, and that the process of institutional reform was incomplete due to an absence of a clear European perspective.