Infrastructure and International Competitiveness: Trends and Challenges

Abstract

During the last few years, the business and Governments in the region should operate in an extremely uncertain environment caused by the Covid-19 pandemic crisis and the Russian-Ukrainian war consequences. Moldova is not an exception, sharing a common frontier with Ukraine and recording frequent economic declines during the last decade as a reaction to many shocks. Moldovan authorities are more than ever concerned with improving competitiveness and increasing enterprises resilience. Given the importance of infrastructure in consolidating international competitiveness, the Moldovan public authorities continue to invest in developing infrastructures especially: road and telecommunication ones. Many services and programs are provided and implemented for enterprises to become more competitive and resilient to internal and external shocks, to facilitate their internalization. The goal of the present research is twofold: to present the main trends and challenges for improving Moldova’s international competitiveness and the second, to evaluate the impact of infrastructure and services provided by Government for business to increase their competitiveness and to facilitate internationalization. In order to carry out the study a quantitative and qualitative research have been undertaken using national and international statistic data, researches and official reports, the results of the business survey carried out in 2022 within the applied research project 20.80009.0807.38 „Multidimensional assessment and development of the entrepreneurial ecosystem at the national and regional level in order to boost the SME sector in the Republic of Moldova”, financed from the state budget of the Republic of Moldova. The main conclusions of the research states about the modest results of the Republic of Moldova to become more competitive internationally and of the Government to support enterprises to cope with some critical challenges that hinders them to boost productivity, and become more competitive and resilient to crisis. At the same time while the telecommunication infrastructure is becoming better due to many public policy incentives, it is not accessible for business from different regions at the same extent, while the road infrastructure is yet a critical challenge for enterprises operating both in the Chisinau city (the capital and the largest city in Republic of Moldova) as well as in other regions of the county. DOI: https://doi.org/10.53486/cike2023.01; UDC: 654.022:338.47(478); JEL: H54, F10, L26, O18