Sustainable development is a challenge facing humanity. EU countries not only strive to reach their specific objectives, but they also work collaboratively towards shared goals. There is a need to balance synergies and compromises to address these objectives effectively. When discussing countries' development and people's well-being, one often focuses on socio-economic development. However, it is crucial not to overlook the environmental...

The paper, mostly empirical in nature, investigates issues on cross-national new information and communication technologies (ICTs) adoption patterns and growth directions. In the period of 2000–2010, a great number of countries underwent substantial changes on the field of ICTs implementation. Many of them made a great “jump” starting with almost “zero level” of ICTs adoption in the year 2000 and during the ten- year period were...

A worldwide event like the 2020 Coronavirus outbreak can only reinforce the interest in modelling trade diversification as a key factor in countries’ vulnerability to external shocks. This paper adopts a detailed relative framework to study the determinants of product-level export variety in a large bilateral panel of developing and developed economies (16,770 country pairs in the period 1988–2014). We find that country pairs characterized...

The aim of the paper is to assess empirially economic growth and productivity patterns in Central and East European Countries (CEECs), and to provide a thorough insight into the factors influencing macroeconomic competitiveness in the CEE region. The study goes back to early 1990s and describes macroeconomic developments in eight countries which joined the EU in 2004 (namely: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania,...

This paper aims to identify patterns of functional specialisation (FS) in global value chains (GVCs) and determinants of upgrading them for selected Central Eastern European (CEE) economies. By combing the World Input-Output Database with data on occupations, we reveal a new FS pattern among subgroups of CEEs. Poland and Slovakia have an unfavourable GVC position and specialise in low value-added fabrication function. In contrast,...