COUNTRY ATTRACTIVENESS EVALUATION AND VISUALIZATION

Abstract

Country attractiveness is critical for the economic development of countries in Central Europe. The ability to attract investment inflows has been ascertained as critical, thus, ensuring enough financial inflows to lead to economic growth, job creation, and raising the standard of living. This study focuses on 9 countries in Central Europe to provide a visualization of their country-level attractiveness. The variables used for the visualizations are GDP, FDI, Political Stability, Government Effectiveness, and Infrastructure, thus the number of people having access to Broadband internet. This study adopted panel data analysis for the research design. The study used the convenience sampling technique to select the countries for the study. The countries selected in Central Europe; Poland, Serbia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Croatia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. The source of data was from multiple authoritative places; World Bank, IMF, and EUROSTAT. The longitudinal data used to span from the period of 2017 - 2021. The software used for the analysis was the Quantum Geographic Information Software (QGIS). The study revealed that countries like the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Slovenia had higher country-level attractiveness compared to the selected countries. This is a result of their higher achievements in political stability, GDP per capita growth, and Government Effectiveness. While, Serbia and Bulgaria performed lower across all the variables on the country level - attractiveness. Countries like Poland, Croatia, and Slovakia made a specific impact in different years. The researcher recommends future studies need to be conducted in other European countries, mostly Eastern and Western Europe to ascertain the impact of the selected variables on their country-level attractiveness. Additionally, there is a need to adopt different variables. Thus, other studies can use inflation, interest rates, import and export, and level of trade with other countries