SUBNATIONAL REGIONAL COMPETITIVENESS: ANALYSIS OF HUNGARIAN MANUFACTURING FIRMS
Апстракт
It is one of the key targets of both national governments and the EU to reduce regional development differences. This paper reviews the proof of existence and potential explanations of subnational regional deviations in competitiveness. Then, the financial data of a sample of Hungarian manufacturing firms from the 2010-2014 period is analysed for regional effects. Based on this data, we cannot reject the existence of regional effects; however, they mainly show up in export intensity, labour efficiency and wage level, rather than in entities’ profitability. Compared to the dispersion among firms within the same region, sub-sector, and size-category, the effect of regional factors seems to be modest. One of the main contributions of this article is to contrast the EU regional competitiveness index with financial statement data in order to show that firm-level competitiveness in Hungary is hard to track by regional indices, as some factors are over-weighted while other variables are missing from those measures. In particular, spatial characteristics like the proximity of more developed areas and central location within a given wider country area are missing.
Downloads
Authors retain copyright of the published papers and grant to the publisher the non-exclusive right to publish the article, to be cited as its original publisher in case of reuse, and to distribute it in all forms and media.
Authors are permitted to deposit publisher's version (PDF) of their work in any repository, personal and institutional websites, but full bibliographic information (authors, titles, volume, issue etc.) about the original publication must be provided.