The measurement of human development using the Ward method of cluster analysis

The Human Development Index is one of the methods how to measure human development. It measures the level of human development both in the economic and social field. Human development is studied at the national level in most cases, yet it might be used at the regional level of a country, too. The objective of the article is to describe the potential for human development in the NUTS II regions of the Visegrad Group Plus countries (the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria and Slovenia) using the cluster analysis. The research was carried out in the period from 2004 to 2013. Initially, a research hypothesis regarding the dynamization of the human development processes in most of the regions was set, moving from a lower to a higher development potential within three groups. This hypothesis was verified by a hierarchy cluster analysis in the Ward method and was not confirmed

A Bibliometric Mapping of Cost-Benefit Analysis—Three Decades of Studies

Over time, the cost-benefit analysis has become a method that helps to clarify the pros and cons in many areas of human activity where both investment and non-investment projects are implemented. In researching for this article, we aimed to map the current state of publishing activities in the field of cost-benefit analysis and in order to accomplish this, four research questions had to be determined. For this purpose, the outputs indexed in the database Web of Science Clarivate Analytics were examined and the method of bibliometric analysis within the VOSviewer software was used. It was ascertained that almost six hundred outputs had been published: almost all of them were published in English and generated by more than sixty percent of authors from English-speaking countries. Cost-benefit analysis was most often used in the areas of healthcare, environment and ecology, and economics and social sciences. In terms of co-authorship, it was found that there had been a shift from collaboration among authors from Israel and English-speaking countries to cooperation between mostly Chinese authors and authors from Northern Europe. In the case of co-occurrence, three clusters were identified: the most frequent was the area of terms related to economic financial analysis, the second area was related to health issues, and the third was related to the process of cost-benefit analysis’ application