0000000000246439
AUTHOR
Oana Cristina Popovici
Mapping Economic Activity in the European Union: Do Ownership, Industry and Location Matter?
The paper proposes a new method for analysing the structure and dynamics of economic activity undertaken by locally owned and foreign-owned companies within the European Union. We employ an unsupervised learning algorithm that generates a neural network depicted on Kohonen maps and offering a clustering of companies with a different ownership (local and foreign) from various industries and countries of the European Union during 2009–2016. The research methodology, based on a self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm, belongs to a class of neural networks trained to organize data so that unknown patterns may be discovered, thus leading to results that cannot be attained by more traditional cluster…
Drivers of Competitiveness in European High-Tech Industries
Our paper builds on the importance of high-tech manufacturing and knowledge-intensive services as significant competitiveness and economic growth drivers in the European Union and offers a fresh approach of the study on the competitiveness of secondary and tertiary high-tech industries across EU member states. Our analysis covers the 2008–2015 period and includes twelve old and new EU members. We opt for a balanced panel data approach in OLS and ARIMA frameworks to investigate the competitiveness of high-technology industries in the EU with the aim of uncovering the nature of the main explanatory factors behind their performance. Our results show that the number of persons employed and the …
Foreign Direct Investments and Economic Growth in Central and Eastern Europe: A Panel-Based Analysis
One of the most discussed issues related to foreign direct investments (FDI) refers to the impact they have on the economic and social welfare of a country. Moreover, if these effects are positive, the question is to what extent and by what instruments they can be enhanced by host country governments. In recent decades, the general political opinion on FDI changed, as they are rather understood as generating competitiveness and growth for host countries and less in terms of their negative effects on the economy. Our paper investigates the relationship between FDI flows and economic growth in countries from Central and Eastern Europe that are also EU members using the panel methodology and i…