The Impact of Soft Knowledge Infrastructure and HRST on Economic Development

Abstract

Globalizing changes in society are able to influence changes in the economies of individual countries. Individual economic entities from various sectors attempt to achieve high economic performance and development. They do this within the conditions that are possible at that time; if there are favorable conditions for their development, this will result in creating innovative production and its subsequent commercialization. Not only private companies but also organizations from the public sector and individual governments are involved in creating this type of environment. However, the effectiveness of the individual steps taken towards an innovative environment or its determinants is not unequivocally positive. This paper’s goal is to analyze the impact of soft knowledge infrastructure and HRST on the economic development of EU 28 economies in 2012 and within CEE countries between 2002-2012. DEA models will be used for analysis with the input being knowledge stock and inflows, patent cooperation and activities, and the output being gross domestic product and value added. The results indicate that CEE countries were less effective than the rest of EU 28 countries in the processes of using selected determinants.