Measuring Sustainable Competitiveness in Contemporary Economies—Insights from European Economy

Abstract

Abstract:The recent transformation of the national economies has raised numerous theoretical and practical aspects in measuring economic growth, welfare, environmental performance, and competitiveness, representing a challenging research topic within the context of economic paradigm transformation. Despite its importance, a fully operational model to be used in any context has not yet been designed. The main aim of this paper is to evaluate and analyze the macroeconomic dimension of the three determinants of sustainable competitiveness: the economic environment, the social environment, and the natural environment, at both the European and Romanian levels. This paper used the Hierarchical Clustering methodology, aiming at evaluating the global competitiveness in terms of a sustainable development model, using four indices: Human Development Index, Environmental Performance Index, Global Competitiveness Index, and GDP per capita. The clusters were designed on the basis of the role of the indices in assessment of the sustainable performances of the countries and also of the possible convergences between them. The results could sustain the conclusion that these indices are not able to offer an exhaustive image of the sustainable performances assessment. A new complex indicator could be considered in order to design a convergence model for the EU member states.

Resilient Entrepreneurship among European Higher Education Graduates

“…In fact, entrepreneurial resilience has been proven to be the result of the match between entrepreneurs' personal characteristics and their environment [72,73]. Other scholars have argued that the increasing focus on sustainability provides better opportunities for innovation and economic development [74], as well as for entrepreneurship [75].…”

Determining Local Economic Development in the Rural Areas of Romania. Exploring the Role of Exogenous Factors

“…Usage of the difference-in-differences method and the propensity scores method can significantly enhance the quality and reliability of future studies regarding the impact of non-refundable programs in local core infrastructure on LED. Furthermore, although the current data did not allow, future research on sustainable local development can and should also take into account inter-community cooperation [64,65], coordination [66] and even community resilience [67,68] or sustainable competitiveness [69] between rural communities (although these concepts might prove to be more problematic to quantify and measure adequately). Other future research potential lies in changing the focus from exogenous factors (such as those analyzed in this article) to endogenous ones, thus shifting the approach from top-down local economic development to the more complex and nuanced bottom-up Community Lead Local Development (CLLD) model [70][71][72].…”

Residents` Perceptions of Socio-Cultural Impacts of Tourism in Vrnjačka Banja, Serbia

“…Countries with strong economies implement consistent development policies and record performance on all three levels − economic, social, and environmental (Subic et al, 2010;Popescu et al, 2017), which are the three key dimensions of sustainability. Economies of different countries have shown vulnerability to a range of internal and external factors (Andrei et al, 2018).…”