Innovation – Globalization – Growth (Selected Relations)

Abstract

Both types of socio-economic processes are strongly influenced by dynamics of technical and technological progress connected with science, research and innovation. It is undisputed that all of these aspects are affected not only by market forces, but they also are significantly influenced by political and other microeconomic parameters including so-called soft factors of growth. On the whole, it influences directly or indirectly behaviour of individual economic actors, especially private businesses which can cause government interference by return and all together provoke the macroeconomic impact sui generis.

However, national economies are not isolated economic islands, but they are part of geographically defined economic units, as well as they may be part of institutionalized economic groupings.

This article focuses on the development of investment efficiency in the globalized world including the role of technical and technological progress.

The aim of the article is to capture differences in the development of wealth creation and allocated investments on continents with higher intensity of globalization processes i.e. after 1970. It will also assess the context of the sector structure of economies, particularly the global impact of intensive development of the tertiary sector and especially by continents.

Particular attention is devoted to comparing the situation of two relatively small open economies the Czech Republic and Japan. They differ from each other by their relationship to integration groupings. The Czech economy is a small open economy and a part of the integration grouping - the European Union - since spring 2004. Japan is an island country, open in particular "way out", but still outside the integration grouping with a strong focus on its historical and cultural traditions.

The authors are trying to answer the question to what extent and whether the integration of national economy affects positively its integration into higher integration units in the reality of the globalized world. Furthermore, they are trying to answer the question to what extent the dynamics of economic growth is affected by the ability of creation and use of science, research and innovation outcomes.

Both of these two main streams of reasoning are interconnected in a subsequent assessment of the effect of economic growth and competitiveness of both countries. Each country is related to other continent with different expected characteristics of sector structures and investment activities, while there also is a perception of non-economic factors affecting the achievement of prosperity in the background.

The fundamental basis is the holistic approach, which enables to perceive economic issues from taking a bird's-eye view, look away from specific details and enable them to subsequent return, especially since they affect the integrity in the result. It is possible to draw useful conclusions for potential acceleration of economic growth from these relevant facts. As a tool to achieve goals is the application of standard methods of economic research - abstraction, induction, deduction, comparison, analysis, synthesis, as well as appropriate statistical methods and graphical analysis.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ee.23.4.2568