Content area
Full text
Abstract: The European Union devotes a lot of attention to the development of knowledge economies and the main result of this concern is the Europe 2020 strategy. From this point of view, the present paper aims to provide a clearer picture of who's who in the European Union with respect to the development of knowledge based economies is concerned. In order to attain the above mentioned objective, first of all is presented the state of art regarding knowledge economy development, by presenting the values that a country is able to register at the 8 indicators of the Europe 2020 strategy objectives. Secondly, the paper presents the results of the quantitative research undergone with the help of Principal Components Analysis and Cluster Analysis on the principal components previously found. The two principal components previously discovered and used for this Cluster Analysis are the Shame Factor and the Environmental Concern Factor and they hold 94.43% of nonredundant information from the 8 initial strategy objective indicators. We analysed the 27 European Union countries, plus Switzerland, Norway and Iceland and the level of the Europe 2020's indicators in 2010. This paper shows the full results of the Cluster Analysis, which gives us the panel of the European Union from the perspective of development of knowledge economies. The results show three groups of countries and allow a summary of several features for each group. Furthermore, this research also provides an additional quantitative support for a previously discovered ranking of the European countries, from the point of view of knowledge economies. The main advantage of this study is that it can raise the interest of research scientists interested in knowledge management and comparative management, for it shows the kinds of countries that have best managed so far to achieve the status of a knowledge economy. It can also be relevant for anyone interested in a professional picture of how the main countries in Europe currently look like from the new economic perspective.
Keywords: Europe 2020 strategy, knowledge economy, European Union, cluster analysis
(ProQuest: ... denotes formula omitted.)
1. Introduction and background research
The present paper aims to further pursue a recent reasearch of Fucec (2012) that managed to make a hierarchy of several European countries, using the objectives of...