Icts and Innovation for Competitiveness: Evidence for Western Balkans Vis-À-Vis the European Union

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to evaluate how well-prepared the Western Balkans (Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia)

Analysis of the influences of ICTs on enterprise innovation performance in China

“…Second, ICTs can improve the production efficiency of enterprises. Through capital deepening and technological progress, ICTs not only improve TFP but also spread advanced and common technologies to relevant manufacturing sectors through spillovers and improve the TFP of the entire manufacturing and service sectors (Kostoska & Hristoski, 2017; Ueki & Tsuji, 2019).…”

“…Compared with the results presented in the existing literature, the conclusions of this study are relatively innovative. The extensive application of ICTs in manufacturing enterprises; the continuous emergence of new technologies, new processes, new businesses; and new ideas such as new designs, customer customization, and supply chain upgrading have led to profound changes in the production processes, organizational modes, and management modes used by traditional manufacturing enterprises (Dzeng et al, 2018; Kostoska & Hristoski, 2017; Madlen & Peter, 2018). Compared with the findings presented in the existing literature, here, we find that the traditional manufacturing industry continues to deepen its integration with the advanced manufacturing industry, improve its service quality, reduce service costs, extend the service chain, and improve its innovation performance (Zhang and Wei, 2019).…”

“…One of the main reasons is that most of the data selected were for the national or industrial level (Yousefi & Dadashpoor, 2020), and existing research lacks an analysis of and solutions for the micro‐level of enterprises (Yeo & Grant, 2019). Macro‐level data comprised micro‐level data that are continuously aggregated (Kostoska & Hristoski, 2017). The results of a regression analysis using macro‐level data are prone to selective bias (Ambe et al, 2018), and the corresponding policy recommendations may not be practical (Dzeng et al, 2018; Majeed & Khan, 2019).…”

Albania as an object and a context of research in economic sciences: bibliometric analysis

“…Sokolova (2016) analyses, from the Russian perspective, the commitment and efforts of Western Balkans nations towards integration with Euro-Atlantic structures. Kostoska and Hristoski (2017) make an attempt to assess the competitiveness of the Western Balkans region in the context of aspirations to join the EU. Damiani and Uvalic (2014) identify lessons related to industrial policy and development in 'old' EU countries and use them to develop recommendations for Western Balkans economies.…”

Best practice of digital government in emerging democracies: Illustrations, challenges and reflections of state building processes

“…A study focusing on smart growth i.e. higher education, technological readiness, business sophistication and innovation in Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia shows that the Western Balkan states lag behind the EU-28 countries [32]. There are discussions on e-readiness including for example fixed-broadband Internet subscriptions, Inter-net bandwidth and mobile-broadband subscriptions.…”