THE DYNAMICS OF COMPETITIVENESS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

In the last decades all advanced economies and economic integrations has been interested in competitiveness enhancing. Also the EU representatives are aware of the importance of increasing competitiveness of individual member states as well as the relevance of the decreasing differences among EU economies. Competitiveness at national level has still ambiguous meaning and different attitudes to competitiveness provide different results. In the contribution the importance of the long-run qualitative competitive advantage is stressed. The competitiveness of a country is defined as its ability to create innovations and to draw on the existing technologies, which is called as quality competitiveness. The goal of the contribution is to verify, whether the competitiveness of the EU member states increase and the heterogeneity in the European Union decrease simultaneously. After the composite indicator construction its development is analyzed and the convergence or divergence tendency of the quality competitiveness in the EU is verified. It was proved, that competitiveness in all EU economies increased in the time period 2000-2012. The results of beta and sigma convergence analysis showed, that the heterogeneity in the European Union decreased in the observed time period.