The paper focuses on selective investment incentives, which are aimed primarily to attract foreign direct investment, in the context of the new EU Member States, namely the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. We discuss the issue within three closely related dimensions. We point to a potential conflict of interests between host country governments and multinational companies in promoting

The possibility that structural changes in international trade might impact countries differently has been a matter of great concern for many observers from the 1950s onwards, and the view that the specialisation pattern of a country in international trade matters for its economic performance has been widespread. This paper analyses the structural changes in international trade from the 1960s omwa

Paper focuses on foreign direct investment (FDI) in manufacturing in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia (CECs), where FDI penetration jumped to remarkable high levels in recent years. Foreign investment enterprises are more profitable, export oriented and technologically superior compared to domestic companies. FDI is perceived as a main channel of technology transfer and potential s

The paper presents alternative analytical approaches to evaluation of structural changes in selected transition economies (Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia). The analysis starts from the comparison of intensity of structural changes, as an introductory (quantitative) concept measuring structural adjustment capacity. Besides the intensity of structural changes, the need for devel

Nonparametric efficiency analysis has become a widely applied technique to support industrial benchmarking as well as a variety of incentive-based regulation policies. In practice such exercises are often plagued by incomplete knowledge about the correct specifications of inputs and outputs. Simar and Wilson (Commun Stat Simul Comput 30(1):159–184, 2001) and Schubert and Simar (J Prod Anal 36(1):5

Although bottom water hypoxia (O2 −1) is presently widespread in the Baltic Sea coastal zone, there is a lack of insight into past changes in bottom water oxygen in these areas on timescales of millennia, and the possible driving factors. Here, we present a sediment-based environmental reconstruction of surface water productivity, salinity and bottom water oxygen for the past 5400 years at Gåsfjär

Transition studies' understanding of differences in public policy is limited due to its tendency to focus on single-country cases. This paper assesses differences in plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) policies, comprising RD&D subsidies, infrastructure investments and sales incentives, across 13 countries over the period 2008-2014. I explore three conditions that may influence these policy expendi

The EU’s stagnation on many innovation indicators led to a number of efforts to spur a turnaround. One of most visible projects has been the Horizon 2020 strategy, which devotes unprecedented levels of funding to the promotion of R&D and innovation. But does this strategy address the right issues to promote innovation? Is Horizon 2020 right to ignore geographical considerations when allocating

In this article, we analyze the impact of firms’ technology bases on their financial performance. By taking a strategic perspective of technology, we argue that it is not sufficient to analyze only the size or novelty/quality of the technology base as technology bases can best be understood as portfolios of individual technologies. In such a framework, risk consideration should be taken into accou

Using data from the German Community Innovation Survey (CIS) from 2008, we analyze whether innovation partnering increases the risk of experiencing infringement of intellectual property (IP). The results show that depending on types of IP innovation, partnerships increase the risk of infringement by up to 37% compared with the average risk in the sample. The results suggest that this massive incre

There is consistent evidence in the literature that an average employee's age is negatively related to firm-level innovativeness. This observation has been explained by older employees working with outdated technological knowledge and being characterized by reduced cognitive flexibility. We argue that firms can mitigate this effect through employee turnover. In particular, turnover of R&D work

Since Solow (Q J Econ 70:65-94, 1956) the economic literature has widely accepted innovation and technological progress as the central drivers of long-term economic growth. From the microeconomic perspective, this has led to the idea that the growth effects on the macroeconomic level should be reflected in greater competitiveness of the firms. Although innovation effort does not always translate i

In economic, scientometric and innovation research, often so-called specialization indices are used. These indices measure comparative strengths or weaknesses as well as specialization profiles of the observation units with respect to certain criteria, such as patenting and publication or trade activities. They allow question like: is Germany specialized in the export of motor vehicles? Or is the

This paper analyses the influence of marketing and organisational changes on the innovation process. Using data from the German community innovation survey 2007, two topics are investigated: First, we analyse whether firm and market characteristics trigger certain innovation strategies. Second, this paper investigates whether marketing and organisational innovations (MO innovations) are complement

The aim of the paper is to assess heterogeneity of the innovation process. Using exploratory factor analysis on micro data from the third Community Innovation Survey in 13 countries, we identify four patterns that can be interpreted as research, user, external, and production ingredients of innovation. All too often it is assumed that how firm innovate can be represented by differences across sect

As scientific collaboration is a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly important, studies on scientific collaboration are numerous. Despite the proliferation of studies on various dimensions of collaboration, there is still a dearth of analyses on the effects, motives and modes of collaboration in the context of developing countries. Adopting Wallerstein's world-system theory, this paper makes

The purpose of this contribution is to present a survey of the recent developments in constructing composite science and technology (S&T) indicators on a national level as well as new evidence of the variability of such S&T indicators which opens the gateway to "country-tuning". It has become standard practice to combine several indicators for science, technology, and innovation to form co