Current Research Projects: Competitiveness

Research Project on Changes in Competitiveness and the Intensity of International Economic Cooperations

Changes in Competitiveness and the Intensity of International Economic Cooperation of the New EU Member States in the Years 2000-2014

During the research project on "Changes in Competitiveness and the Intensity of International Economic Cooperation of the New EU Member States in the Years 2000-2014", granted by the National Science Center in Poland, Prof. Dr. Zmuda together with the research team from Partner Universities: Warsaw School of Economics (Prof. Dr. habil. Czarny and Dr. habil. Folfas) and the Krakow University of Economics (Prof. Dr. habil. Molendowski), published numerous journal papers and presented the conceptual and empirical research outcomes on many international conferences.

Key project findings have been summarized in the monograph "Competitiveness of a Catching-up Economy in the Era of Globalisation: Evidence from the New EU Member States", focusing on national competitiveness and sustainable integration of catching-up economies within the network of global interconnections. The authors provide a comprehensive perspective and define national competitiveness as the ability to reach developmental goals in the era of globalisation. They stress that for catching-up economies, which have a limited economic and technological potential, internationalisation plays a particularly important role in developing long-term competitiveness.

The authors exemplify catching-up economies with the New EU Member States, which joined the EU in the years 2004 and 2007. These countries began their journey to the market economy with ineffective institutions, relatively outdated economic structures, tendency to autarky and constrained economic relations determined by central planning rather than the actual economic interests. The authors investigate whether 15 years after the accession, the NMS made progress on the developmental pathway to converge to the most advanced EU states. Many methods of analysis are used in this monograph, e.g. a generalised double diamond model or game theoretic approach. Based on conceptual considerations, the authors conduct an empirical investigation into the experiences of the NMS in building long-term competitiveness.

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