Competitiveness Assessment of Slovak Republic Regions

The issue of competitiveness is directly related to international trade. The theories explain the factors of international trade in such a way that there is visible indication of a need to change an approach to understand competitiveness in economic policy. Despite the fact competitiveness is discussed in many studies, there is still no clear definition of this term in the literature. Competitiveness can be viewed from multiple angles. Therefore, it can be analysed at the international level and at the national level too. Besides this introduction, the theoretic part of the paper offers an overview of the approaches applied to not only describe competitiveness as part of trade, but also to measure it and to evaluate it. The special attention is paid to the analysis devoted to the Slovak regions. Local targeting lies in observation the data from the particular regions. One of the approaches understands competitiveness in form of gross domestic product. Our analysis takes it in this way. There are the eleven indicators selected that are able to model the level of competitiveness. These indicators are based on distribution of population, patents, households' income, employment, tertiary educated employed population, unemployment, economic activity of population, health insurance, criminality, municipal waste, and road network.