International competitiveness, productivity and innovations

Abstract

The countries that seek to increase their wealth and the wellbeing of their population should promote policies to increase their competitiveness and therefore to strengthen their ability to obtain decent incomes on external markets form the sales of goods and services they produce. Exports are a mean to avoid the small size of the internal market. They let companies to increase economies of scales by extending the market, to specialize and improve production processes and their products and services. Exporting companies may have access to a more sophisticated demand, to new knowledge, technologies. Thus increasing exports should spur aggregate productivity and economic growth. On the other side exports performance is a reflection of a country competitiveness. The competitive advantage of countries depends on the ability of companies to innovate and upgrade and the national environment is very important in this regards (Porter, 1990). The objective of the research is to evaluate the innovation environment, productivity and international competitiveness of the Republic of Moldova comparing to Central European countries. Some of the conclusions the authors have drawn from the undertaken research are as follows. Moldova rank significant lower comparative to the benchmark countries as concerns the innovation input sub index and knowledge impact index of the Global Innovation Index produced by Global forum of intellectual property. The knowledge impact expressed in production and exports complexity, labor productivity growth, and high tech exports of total trade is small that explains the share of Moldova in the world export market. CZU: [339.137+330.34+001.895]:[061.1EU+338(478)]; JEL: F43, F68, O47; DOI: https://doi.org/10.53486/cike2022.01