Slovak Creativity Index – A PCA Based Approach

The article aims at transferring the European Creativity Index (ECI) assessment from the country to regional comparison basis, focusing on the case of Slovakia. The newly created Slovak Creativity Index (SCI) has the power to assess the creativity potential found in the Slovak regions. The Principal Component Analysis has been chosen as an advanced method for establishing a well-designed overall Index and six sub-indices to show differences and variability according to all dimensions of the creative potential. The research also explains several relations between creative performance of the regions by several factors such as urbanisation, cultural environment, human capital and tolerance

Dimensions and Evaluation of Social Capital and Its Regional Distribution in the Slovak Republic

The paper deals with the dimensions of social capital in the Slovak Republic. The aim is to assess how social capital is distributed socially among the citizens of the Slovak Republic and geographically among the regions of the country. Social capital is evaluated on a basis of the three dimensions, where networks, trust and civism belong. The paper analyses the data from the European Values Study survey, especially the 2008 wave. The results of this study show that social capital has kept a decreasing tendency in the Slovak Republic throughout the period from the year 1991 to the year 2008. The reasons behind this may lie in the historical development of the country - the transformation of the economy and the dissolution of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic. With respect to a social distribution, social capital is generally higher among more educated, right-wing Slovaks with higher earnings. In the terms of a geographical distribution, the Trnava Region and the Trenčín Region appear to have less developed social capital compared to the other regions in Slovak Republic

Úloha aglomeračných úspor pre rast zamestnanosti v odvetví znalostne intenzívnych služieb

The paper investigates the impact of agglomeration economies on the regional employment growth in the knowledge intensive services (KIS) in Slovakia over the period 1998 to 2014 by estimating spatial econometric models. Assuming that knowledge spillovers and externalities are stronger between industries with shared knowledge bases and complementarities, we analyse the role of different forms of sectoral variety at the district level in Slovakia. Results indicate that localization economies has a generally negative impact on the employment growth in the KIS sector, however the results show a strong evidence of the beneficial effect of related variety, while no role is played by unrelated variety. When looking at knowledge spillover between KIS and manufacturing, the KIS industry is affected by related variety in manufacturing industry, while no evidence of externalities is found from the tertiary sectors to manufacturing. The results question the merits of interventions promoting regional specialisation and emphasise that diversity into the related industries should be one of the policy issue areas