Competitiveness of the Selected Countries of the EU with a Focus on the Quality of the Business Environment

The business environment and entrepreneurship are important elements in the economic growth of each country. The better the business environment a given country offers, the more attractive the country is for small and large companies as well as for private entrepreneurs. A high level of business competitiveness can help a country secure economic growth, especially after overcoming a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Many institutions focus on the measurement of the business environment using indices to evaluate its quality. The main goal of the present study is to evaluate the quality of the business environment through multicriteria analysis. For the period from 2018 to 2020, the data were analysed by using seven selected indices of the weighted sum approach (WSA) and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods. The research sample included all EU countries that joined the EU at the same time in 2004. The processing of analytical data was gradually implemented by using descriptive statistics and multicriteria evaluation methods. The methods used in the multicriteria evaluation of variants determined the rankings of the individual variants in terms of the selected criteria using entropy. We concluded that the efficiency of the business environments in Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia are below the EU average. Within this group of countries, Estonia, Malta and Slovenia have seen the largest regeneration of their business environment since having joined the EU.

Performance of Multicriteria Evaluation and Heuristic Methods in the Delineation of Green Infrastructure in Areas with Fragmented Landscapes

The EU Commission has established Green infrastructure as one of the tools to preserve biodiversity and grant the provision of ecosystem services that reduce impacts on natural values like those produced by climate change. Therefore, a European green infrastructure strategy has been created that commit member states to incorporate green infrastructure to their territorial planning. Yet, methodologies to delimit green infrastructure so as to facilitate its inclusion in territorial plans are still scarce. The available methods are mainly based in multicriteria evaluation and focus on zoning general green infrastructure areas taking into account the provision potential of just a few ecosystem services. Considering the provision of a wide range of ecosystem services to delimit green infrastructure elements is key to grant their multifunctionality and increase their efficiency mitigating climate change impacts in natural values and human population. However, the lack of data or the high cost to accurately map ecosystem services provision potential, leads most of the time to infer it from land cover data. This creates problems when using these maps to delimit green infrastructure in areas with fragmented landscapes; since identified green infrastructure areas may be irregular and scattered. There are heuristic methods like simulated annealing that have been used to identify ecosystem services hot spots which consider the regularity and size of the identified patches. These methods can be used to delimit green infrastructure in fragmented landscapes finding a balance between the regularity of the areas and their potential to provide multiple ecosystem services. In the current work, a comparison has been made between the performance of simulated annealing and current multicriteria evaluation methods to delimit green infrastructure multifunctional buffer zones in an area of north-western Spain with a very fragmented landscape. Results have shown that simulated annealing delimits more regular multifunctional buffer areas but with a less average potential for providing multiple ecosystem services. The conclusions of the paper indicate that simulated annealing is good produces more regular multifunctional areas but with a lower ESs provision potential. It was observed that in the case of ESs that were mapped considering factors at landscape scale, their provision potential did not vary too much between the multifunctional buffer areas delimited with each of the methods. This indicates that delineation methods may produce more regular GI elements if ESs provision potential is mapped considering the influence of biophysical factors at a wider landscape scale.