Expanding globalization of the world economy has put a strong pressure on individual entities that operate in it. International competitiveness has become a major driving force of economic and social differentiation of the countries. Individual states and their public administrations have to create an effective business environment. This paper reflects these developments and, with the help of relevant multi-criteria (GCI, WCI, DBI) and single-criteria indexes of competitiveness, tries to assess the current state of competitiveness of two regions in Central and Eastern Europe – the Visegrad Four and Baltic Group states, which had a similar starting position on their path to building a market economy and integration into the EU structures.
To success on international markets, individual economies are trying to take measures to increase their efficiency, flexibility and competitiveness. There is a liberalization of tariff and non-tariff barriers mainly due to trade based on regional integration. Among such agreements belong also the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the USA, which represent the largest economies in the world. The paper analyses developed scientific studies that assess the economic impact, advantages and disadvantages of closer economic cooperation. However, it reflects not only the economic but also foreign policy importance of this partnership. In the case of signing the TTIP, it would become the most important bilateral trade agreement ever, both in terms of international trade as well as in terms of the impact on international trade as a whole.
In Slovakia, the privatization of the state property in the beginning of the 1990s created a need for the corporate governance implementation. The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the level of implementation of corporate governance in Slovakia after more than 25 years since starting the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy, including a legal framework for its implementation. To support our analysis, we explored a relationship between the level of the corporate governance implementation and economic results of corporations. For this purpose, we reviewed annual reports for year 2015 by 27 corporations listed on the Bratislava Stock Exchange. The average profit of the evaluated corporations was approaching 21 million EUR, and the average assets value was at 1.2 billion EUR. Using the scoring method devised by us for this purpose, the average score of the annual report evaluation reached 2.59 points out of maximum 5 points. Finally, we tested a hypothesis that improving the level of corporate governance implementation may contribute to profitability and assets value of corporations.
For the Slovak, highly open and export-oriented economy, foreign trade is an important factor of economic growth. In the current global economic environment, the process of interconnecting economic relations between countries is constantly growing and the professional economic diplomacy, as a part of the foreign trade policy of each economy, plays an important role. Therefore, the aim of our research was to use scientific research methods to assess the impact of the Slovak economic diplomacy on the fulfilment of pro-export policy goals. At the same time, we try to evaluate how the performance of economic diplomats and models of economic diplomacy affect the development of the economy and export performance. We also focused on examining the task of the innovative diplomacy.
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