Multidimensional Approach to Evaluation of Visegrad Countries' competitiveness in Comparison with Austria and Germany

The paper deals with an application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method to multicriteria performance evaluation of the Visegrad Four countries (V4) in comparison with selected advanced European Union's (EU) countries - Austria and Germany. The aim of the paper is to analyse a degree of efficiency achieved in individual countries which is perceived as a reflection of the level of competitive potential in three reference years 2000, 2005 and 2010. The theoretical part of the paper is shortly devoted to the fundamental bases of competitiveness in the context of performance/productivity theory and the methodology of factor and cluster analysis (FA, CA) and DEA method. The multivariate methods, CA and FA, have been used to DEA modelling. The empirical part is aimed at measuring the degree of productivity and level of efficiency changes of evaluated countries by the specialized DEA approach - the Malmquist (Productivity) Index (MI/MPI) measuring the change of technical efficiency and the movement of the frontier in terms of evaluated countries. The final part of the paper offers a comprehensive comparison of results obtained by calculating the MI/MPI.