The middle and long-term slowdown in growth dynamics could bring serious social and political problems for V4 countries (Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Hungary, Poland) and Romania. It would threaten reaching benefits from potential of convergence process with the developed countries of the European Union. As a result, the V4 economies and Romania should find solutions to achieving a sustainable growth that is associated with an improvement of their international competitiveness. This paper provides an empirical analysis of factors that might determine a stable economic growth in the five mentioned countries. The empirical analysis conducted for the period of 2003-2016 employed Bayesian generalized ridge regression. The main results indicated that the FDI promoted economic growth in all countries, except the Slovak Republic. Only in the Czech Republic, the expenditure on education generated economic growth, while the expenditure on R&D had positive effects in Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

The deployment of renewable energy sources (RES) is considered to be an important objective for the energy sector in the European Union (EU). The EU Directive adapted in 2009 fixed mandatory national targets for the use of renewable energy in transport as well as for the share of RES in the gross final energy consumption. Contrary to previous studies, this paper does not examine the link between the RES and economic growth but rather focuses on real gross domestic product (GDP) and the implementation of national renewable energy targets. We employ panel data models for the case of the EU-28 countries covering the period between 2007 and 2017 that yield a low and positive relationship between the impact of GDP per capita and the share of RES in the final consumption. Our results show that there is a significant causality only from real GDP per capita to the share of renewable energy in final consumption, marking the potential of developed countries to consume more RES. We list some groups of countries according to these variables using a cluster analysis approach. Starting from the proposed panel data models, we constructed the scenarios for the 2020 for various shares of RES and different EU Member States. Overall, it appears that more attention should be attributed to policy proposals in which funding opportunities would be dependent on the achievements of national targets and economic benefits should be given to countries with very good performance in achieving high shares of renewable energy in their final energy consumption.

The goal of this research is to investigate the relationship between economic growth and foreign direct investment inflows in the European Union

Considering that the European Directive has imposed that at least 20% of the total energy should come from renewable energy sources (RES) by 2020 already and the specific targets for each European Union Member State, this paper attempts to assess the importance of GDP per capita in realizing these targets and also the effects of the RES share in electricity. Contrary to previous research, this paper does not consider the connection between economic growth and RES, but rather the potential connection between the share of RES in electricity and the real GDP per capita. The panel data models indicated to a positive, but very low impact of GDP per capita on the share of RES in electricity in the period of 2007–2017 in the case of the EU countries, except Luxembourg that has outlier values of GDP per capita. However, causality between the two variables was not identified. Some groups of countries were described according to these variables using cluster analysis. Future research should focus on the extension of this model by including other important variables such as RES potential available in the countries with specific geographical conditions.

and Hungary. The Bayesian approach is utilized for checking whether Poland and Ukraine have similar expectation of GDP and net migration during 1991-2013. A negative correlation was recorded between net migration and the real GDP rate in the previous period. During the period of 1991-1994 corresponding to transition, each 10 percent increase in the GDP rate caused a 0.6 percent decrease in net migration at the significance level of 5%. A higher increase was registered in the economic depression (1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000), while the greater decrease, with 4.58 percentage points for each 10 per cent in the GDP rate, was observed for the period of economic boom. Computing the differences between Ukraine and Poland, we obtained the expectations of -17.7187 and 15.745 with a higher variance of the estimator for Ukraine.