THE ENTREPRENEURIAL NETWORKS AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN LATVIA

The issue of the facilitation of even development of territories and the ensurance of such development is topical even for the advanced countries. This matter is even more topical for the countries of transition period, including Latvia. During the transition from the planned economy to the market economy the development of entrepreneurship was very uneven in Latvia. As a result the following problems came into existence in the entrepeneurship in Latvia: 1. the uneven arrangement of business activities in the regions of Latvia that creates explicit economical, employment and social problems in several regions, which result in uneven regional development and stratification of territories. 2. in most of the cases the strategical cooperation for the improvement of entrepreneurial processes is not implemented between the interconnected and intercomplementary enterprises. This determined the necessity for the research presented in the paper. The authors of the paper have analysed GDP as the factor that characterizes regional development in Latvia and the factors influencing it (unemployment level, the number of economically active enterprises and businesses per 1000 inhabitants, nonfinancial investments per capita per year, and the amount of income tax on average per capita), as well as the authors have stated the prior sectors of the enterprise networks in Latvia.