Input-Output Analysis of Regional Innovativeness. The case of the Visegrad Group.

One of the most important determinants of national and regional competitiveness are innovations. Innovations treated as the process of building, development and exploitation of new ideas, methods and technologies influence competitiveness in two ways. Firstly, they change organizational structures, production methods and marketing strategies and in effect improve productivity. Secondly, they introduce new or remarkably improved products. Innovation has a spatial distribution. However, limited data available at regional level is an important obstacle to studying innovation geography. The objective of the paper is to compare innovativeness of 35 NUTS-2 Visegrad Group (V4) regions in the years 2004-2009. The analysed period is the 4th stage of transformation process in CEECs, characterised by visible uniformity in development paths. The lack of actual and comparable regional data for the whole group of regions causes the termination of analysis in the year 2009. The paper is organised as follows. The study starts from a comprehensive survey of the literature on innovations and their measures. The theoretical section is supplemented by empirical one (section 2), based on Eurostat Regional Statistics. I apply input-output analysis. Input and output indexes of regional innovativeness are based on synthetic measure (Strahl 1978, 2007). The variables correspond to the variables proposed in European Innovation Scoreboard. The aim of the analysis is to compare both indexes and their changes in the V4 regions and to identify groups of regions similar in terms of both indexes. The results show that there have been and continue to be substantial differences among the V4 regions as regards innovativeness. Differences are particularly visible in case of capital regions, which are characterised by the highest input- and output indexes (except for Mazowieckie). High indexes have also 2 Czech regions: Strední Cechy and Jihovýchod. In the V4, high value of input index not always corresponds to high value of output index. The lowest output indexes were recorded for Polish Eastern regions. The majority of Polish regions has medium input indexes. To the group characterised by low or medium input indexes and high output indexes belong mainly Czech and Hungarian regions. In Slovak regions low input indexes correspond to medium output indexes. Analysing the results, one should not forget that they are based on several selected variables, which are a resultant of -in some measure- random choice and data accessibility. Presumably, adding or subtracting one of the variables would lead to slightly different results. However it should not underrate the importance of this research.