Teresa Sequeira (p), Conceição Rego, Andreia Dionísio

Diana Cibulskiene

The productivity of a sector, which is an important precondition for competitiveness, depends, among other factors, on the investment made.
This relationship between investment, understood as an increase in capital, and productivity has been the subject of numerous studies, varying in particular according to the type of investment: from investment in physical capital, such as improvements in infrastructure and technology, to investment in human capital through the promotion of employee training and qualification, to a more intangible investment, such as investment in Innovation and Development (R&D), in improving production and management processes.

Similarly, these studies vary according to the sector and location of the production activity, as well as the methodology used to analyse the effects and the correlation between the investment made, productivity and growth.

In this context, the main aim of this work is to investigate the amounts of investment made in the agri-food industry in the north of Portugal (NUT II region), as well as the asymmetries at sub-regional level, during the last two EU support frameworks, namely QREN (2007-13) and Portugal 2020 (2014-2020) and to relate this investment to the evolution of productivity.

In methodological terms and after a theoretical review, the empirical work will begin by collecting information from the various entities that manage EU funds, followed by classifying this data according to the various subsectors of the food and beverage industries, as well as their distribution across the NUT III regions of the North, calculating the relative accesses.
Subsequently, the evolution of productivity in these sectors and the relationship between the two variables, investment and productivity, will be analysed using statistical methods.

The results will make it possible to evaluate the effectiveness of public policies to support investment and thus optimise the use of public resources.
In particular, to identify which sectors have the greatest dynamism in promoting fund raising and which show the greatest impact in terms of productivity; in other words, an assessment of the return on private investment supported with public funds, stimulating competitiveness, as well as identifying strategic sectors and promoting transparency and accountability in the management of public resources.

EN: This work is supported by national funds, through the FCT – Portuguese Foundation for Science
and Technology under project UIDB/04007/2020 and project UIDB/04011/2020 (https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDB/04011/2020).

Yongdi Hou (p), Irina Yankina, Ekaterina Isupova

Diana Cibulskiene

China recently declared the readiness to launch the digital currency and started to prepare the financial infrastructure to reach the best results in the shortest time. Actually during the Olympic Games the pilot projects with digital yuan (e-CNY) was already launched and some lessons learned.
Government do understand that it would give the great competitive advantage in the whole world in terms of transactions’ conditions and facilities. The main goal is to make the economic agents use e-CNY in daily transaction, to increase the financial inclusion. It is too complicated to evaluate the role of e-CNY for the economic growth and we made the attempt to evaluate its role in the indirect way - to estimate the role of financial inclusion’s indicator on the Gross regional product, demonstrates its significant role for Chinese Provinces.
We made the assumption that e-CNY will be interesting to use first of all for those who are already involved in the financial market - who have already had WeChat or Alipay apps and accounts. Unfortunately there is no possibility to find the exact data, so we try to use one that reflects the same tendency for us. So ss for indicators of financial inclusion we use data from World Bank, such as - account ownership at the financial institutions or with a mobile-phone service provider for young adults and for older adults (25+). There is data only for 2011, 2014, 2017 and 2021 yy., so we decided to make the panel data analysis only for these years.
We decided to use the basic economic growth model (Solow and Romer’s ones) and included the indicators of financial inclusion. To understand the role of financial inclusion for the economic growth we used data from National Bureau of Statistics of China, such as - growth regional product, population, investment (investment in fixed assets , excluding Rural Households), expenditure on RD. As a result we will provide the empirical evidence about the role of financial inclusion for economic growth in Chinese provinces.

Jussi Heikkilä (p)

Yongdi Hou

We explore the role and impact of standards for businesses in the Finnish context. The benchmark for the study is the annual German Standardization Panel and the recently piloted European standardization panel. In contrast to these online surveys that are quantitative in nature, the approach of the Finnish standardization panel is more exploratory and qualitative and relies on a large number of expert interviews. The target is to interview 100 Finnish experts from various fields (national standards organisations, industry associations, companies, research institutes, academic researchers) during 2024. The interviews are currently ongoing, so final conclusions are yet to be derived. Preliminary observations and anecdotal evidence indicate that standards development has been a rather neglected
dimension of national innovation policy. The interview data will provide a big picture of the functioning of the Finnish standardization ecosystem as well as its challenges and opportunities in the current geopolitical environment. In particular, we will investigate the perceptions that experts have regarding the status of Finnish standardization awareness and education as well as learning paths of Finnish standardization experts. We expect to derive policy implications and suggestions on how the Finnish and
European standardization ecosystems could be developed further. Finland is a European small open economy and the findings of the Finnish Standardization Panel could be generalizable and have implications to other European small open economies. In Finland, there is an initiative to develop the national standardization strategy and the expert interviews can act as important input in the development
process.

Diana Cibulskiene (p), Aistė Padgureckienė (p)

Jussi Heikkilä

The research focuses on a relevant and insufficiently investigated problem of venture capital investments. The global scope of this aspect is increasingly becoming more popular in academic research because of the likely higher profitability. However, venture capital investments may encounter a higher level of risks for new business ideas or products, or for those ideas or products which are already being developed. These investments increase the own capital of companies and are used for funding the seed capital, the start of performance or the later stages of a business in progress. Venture capital investments are highly significant for companies creating new, innovative products and technologies. The analysis of scientific research works has shown that, when assessing the impact of venture capital investments at the country level, venture capital investments are associated with economic growth, financial development, innovations, creation of new businesses, and productivity. The research problem deals with how to assess the impact of a country’s venture capital investments on labour productivity and the impact of a country’s venture capital investments on its labour productivity. The research aims to design a model for assessing the impact of venture capital investments on the country’s labour productivity and empirically validate it in the EU countries after analysing the phenomena of venture capital investments and labour productivity. For the research have been used these methods: graphic representation of data, cluster analysis, multiple correlation and regression analysis of panel data. The research results were obtained by using the GRETL software package. The selected research duration covers the period from 2007 to 2019. The research sample consists of 25 countries of the European Union because the OECD does not provide data on venture capital investments in Cyprus, Croatia and Malta for 2007–2019. The research substantiated both the direct impact of venture capital investments on labour productivity and the impact of venture capital investments on labour productivity conditioned by the innovative environment and financial development factors. The main findings show that venture capital investments do not determine the labour productivity growth in the EU-25 countries.