Competitiveness of the Selected Countries of the EU with a Focus on the Quality of the Business Environment

Abstract

The business environment and entrepreneurship are important elements in the economic growth of each country. The better the business environment a given country offers, the more attractive the country is for small and large companies as well as for private entrepreneurs. A high level of business competitiveness can help a country secure economic growth, especially after overcoming a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Many institutions focus on the measurement of the business environment using indices to evaluate its quality. The main goal of the present study is to evaluate the quality of the business environment through multicriteria analysis. For the period from 2018 to 2020, the data were analysed by using seven selected indices of the weighted sum approach (WSA) and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods. The research sample included all EU countries that joined the EU at the same time in 2004. The processing of analytical data was gradually implemented by using descriptive statistics and multicriteria evaluation methods. The methods used in the multicriteria evaluation of variants determined the rankings of the individual variants in terms of the selected criteria using entropy. We concluded that the efficiency of the business environments in Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia are below the EU average. Within this group of countries, Estonia, Malta and Slovenia have seen the largest regeneration of their business environment since having joined the EU.

Problems and Opportunities for the Business Environment in the Rezekne Special Economic Zone

“…The present research has summarized the characteristics and definitions of the business environment given by some researchers:  the business environment is a variable that requires constant research and consequently facilitates strategic, dynamic and successful cooperative decision-making and the creation of new products and services (Ostos et al, 2016);  a good business environment is a basic element to attract business gatherings, release investment potential, improve the credibility and influence of the entire country and promote economic development. (Liang et al, 2021);  the quality of the business environment is considered to be the country's ability to provide businesspersons with a sufficient level of freedom and low taxes, and the country's ability to produce products cheaply and efficiently at minimal production capacity (Hajduova et al, 2021). The authors of the present research conclude that the definitions of a business environment could be very different, depending on the particular situation; however, despite this, all the definitions include the same main elements: the role of national governments in shaping the business environment, strategic decisions made by company managements, which are based on detailed environmental analyses, as well as the company's ability to adapt to various changes using the available resources.…”

Marketing experiencial y competitividad empresarial: revisión sistemática

“…Las organizaciones deben evitar la estaticidad, buscando ser parte activa del cambio tecnológico, alineado a la innovación en I+D, considerándose como fuente de competitividad (Hajduova et al, 2021;30;Li, Terjesen & Umans, 2020). Las organizaciones necesitan potenciar las oportunidades que brinda el entorno, mediante estrategias que contemplen un análisis de las tendencias macroambientales que generen ventajas competitivas sobre los rivales mediante la alineación de sus negocios al entorno (Binns et al, 2022;Mukerjee et al, 2016) Además, la competitividad requiere la incorporación de estrategias enfocadas en el cliente, que permitan, mediante el conocimiento de estos, gestionar los recursos para la generación de valor diferenciado ante otras ofertas del mercado (Mukerjee et al, 2016).…”

“…Se define a la competitividad empresarial como los mecanismos de respuesta de la organización para asegurar la sobrevivencia y un desempeño exitoso (Karman y Savanevičienė, 2021;Pérez et al, 2021), mecanismos que incluyen elementos como; innovación (Luamba et al, 2021;Yeh et al, 2019), acciones de mercadeo, equipos de alto desempeño, eficiencia, productividad y desarrollo de capacidades dinámicas (Ibarra et al, 2017), entre otras. Además, se destaca la importancia de este concepto para las organizaciones, impactando en el bienestar de sociedad y naciones (Arnold, 2018;Agyapong et al, 2016;Binns et al, 2022;Saltos-Cruz et al, 2022), más aún en realidades tan riesgosas como al que nos enfrentan las pandemias y las crisis políticas y económicas (Hajduova et al, 2021;Li et al, 2020).…”

“…Lo expuesto se configura como una problemática, dado que un nivel elevado de competitividad aporta a las naciones en su crecimiento económico y por ende impacta en la calidad de vida de sus pobladores, más aún ante un escenario incierto, como el que les deja una pandemia COVID-19, la crisis políticas y militares que vivimos en el planeta, ante lo descrito, las organizaciones buscan validar estrategias que incidan positivamente en sus índices de competitividad (Hajduova et al, 2021;Diez, 2021;Rivas, Carrillo & Robinson, 2022).…”

Comprehensive evaluation and spatial-temporal differences analysis of China’s inter-provincial doing business environment based on Entropy-CoCoSo method

“…"Science and technology is the primary productive force". Scholars have applied many methods to measure the level of DB environment, mainly including Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method (Randelovic et al, 2020), Equalization method (Hajduova et al, 2020), Principal Component Analysis method (Borojo and Jiang, 2020), TOPSIS (Hajduova et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2020) and fuzzy linguistic (Roham et al, 2009). However, the weights of indicators are given by experts in advance in most existing research, which has a strong subjectivity according to experts' preferences (Tan et al, 2018).…”