克羅地亞共和國的知識程度
 

“知識社會”這個屬于已經成為過去十年以來，科學性和專家討論的中心。顯而易見，它已成為對福利社會發展的指導性準則。這篇文章重點是探索和發現衡量國家水平知識的最好方式。作為一個被選中的案例，由于對克羅地亞共和國的長達十年的分析，使得它被考慮為全球變化的因素。本研究的結論就是克羅地亞從1994至2004的可觀測段內，還未真正地經歷過了不起的和顯著的變化。這篇研究報告也能清晰地表明補充統計公報的需求和與全球化社會內部發生的改變相一致的當代指標。本文的最終目的就是要揭示指向競爭性科技社會的未來方向的清晰視野，以及實現那一目標的必要步驟。
 

關鍵詞：知識，指標，克羅地亞，知識社會，競爭力
 

在過去20年，許多改變發生了，這需要一個整個世界現場參與者的靈活調整，包括所有的國家，國際性組織，科學性機構和每個世界居民。我們到底是通過什么方式去理解世界，從而突然改變我們停滯不前的現狀？

Extent Of Knowledge In The Republic Of Croatia Economics Essay

 

The term “knowledge society” has been in the centre of scientific and expert discussions during the last decade. It has clearly become guiding principle towards the development of the welfare society. The focus of this paper is to explore and find the best way to measure knowledge on national level. As a chosen example the analysis of a ten years long period for the Republic of Croatia was made taking global changes into consider. The conclusion of the research is that Croatia has not experienced truly remarkable and significant shifts in the observed period from 1994 to 2004. This research also clearly shows the need to supplement statistical bulletins and publications with contemporary indicators which are in accordance with changes happening inside the global society. The final purpose of the paper was to reveal the clear vision of the future direction towards the competitive knowledge society and requirements about necessary steps to achieve that goal.

 

Key words: Knowledge, indicators, Croatia, knowledge society, competitiveness

 

1. INTRODUCTION

 

During the last 20 years many changes happened which required a flexible adjustment of all the world scene participants which includes all countries, the international community, scientific institutions and every world resident. What has so suddenly changed our stagnant paradigm through which we understood the world? The answer includes new technological solutions, cutting down tariff and non-tariff barriers, demographic explosion, emergence of potential new world forces like China and India, alarming events in our eco-system… It was necessary to react as fast as possible and to create a unified global development strategy. But still each country at this changing time had to establish its own development strategy to fulfill the final goal which is the achievement of the competitive advantage on the international market and finally to achieve higher growth rate of the national economy. The leading motto of each country is “to be better”.

 

Where is the position of Croatia? Croatia has valuable natural resources which make a strong national comparative advantage but what is questionable is the method for reaching competitive advantage. According to Porter “national prosperity is created, not inherited” [1] and that is why the national development strategy can not rely on the fact that the country has endowed resources. What is then the optimal national strategy for a small Croatian economy? “Many researches show that small countries′ relative position grew stronger and that the liberalization of the international exchange, higher internationalization level and modern technological changes give opportunities to small countries to compensate their limitations.” [2] It is required to make a realistic indication of economic conditions to realize strengths and opportunities establishing a stable national position. The term “knowledge society” is in the centre of scientific and expert discussions during the last decade. But the main question is how to define the knowledge on a national macro-level? What is included into the category of national knowledge? The task which arises and which is the focus of this paper is to explore and find the best path to measure knowledge of a whole society.

 

Analyzing the condition of Croatia during the past decade and taking all global changes into consideration accounts, the author gives clear vision of the future direction towards a competitive knowledge society with requirements about necessary steps to achieve that goal.

 

2. NATIONAL COMPETITIVENESS

 

National competitiveness is today’s most used term when we talk about countries′ positions on the global market. But the fact is that no one can clearly define what the competitiveness for one country truly signifies. “Competitiveness is now a buzzword, despite the fact that there is no consensus of what competitiveness really is.” [3] Through which phenomenon can we analyze and measure competitiveness? Answer to that question arises from developed countries—— stories about their growth and the development direction.

 

Reaching the ruling position (term today is national competitiveness) during economic history, was the strategic goal of the particular economy. But the framework for determining the competitiveness (on micro and macro level) changed. In traditional theories, competitiveness and national growth rate were observed through focusing on traditional production factors (labor, land, capital). Following global dynamic processes, traditional production function spreads and includes knowledge and technology as external factors. At this time of international market globalization and internalization, knowledge and technology took places on leading positions in production functions. ?Now analytical approaches are being developed so that knowledge can be included more directly in production functions. Investments in knowledge can increase the productive capacity of the other factors of production as well as transform them into new products and processes. And since these knowledge investments are characterised by increasing returns, they are the key to long-term economic growth“. [4] This is the common denominator of each highly developed nation——s story-knowledge and technology. There are quite the differences between economic conditions before their development, differences in their national mentality, in historical occasions, but what is mutual among those countries is the fact that they all recognized the role of knowledge and in their unique and relatively innovative way used it into their purposes for reaching welfare.

 

Many scientists define competitiveness through the activity of enterprises in one country, so many divisions of knowledge and human capital are seen from enterpreneurial position. It is impossible to separate macro and micro approaches [5] , but the main guideline during the research was to orientate on the national competitiveness analysing the human capital (residents) so this paper focuses explicitly on the macro-competitiveness. ?Understanding the role of knowledge in growth is more difficult. You then have to open the macro box called technology and let all the actors out in their capacity of being carriers of competence (dynamics). (…) If we want to understand we have to look inside, and represent the complicated dynamics between more or less autonomous behaving (and live) actors with a varied assortment of embodied competencies at the micro market level“. [6] According to Porter——s definition, competitiveness is defined as a ?country——s capacity to compete others on the world market with global strategy“ [7] . Specific socio-economic characteristics and the national aspiration of competing others on the international scene where determinants which led the author in constructing proposals which can make Croatia to become a respected participant and a recognizable knowledge society in the global game of domination.

 

3. KNOWLEDGE AS THE HIGH PRIORITY ELEMENT OF NATIONAL COMPETITIVENESS

 

One of the definitions of knowledge is that “knowledge is the sum of skills and capabilities of the educated person who uses high technology and information which became main factors of the human activity. In the modern economic organization (…) knowledge becomes the main production factor. (…) Expansion of education and the developed and applied scientific work is closely linked with the leading role of the knowledge in connecting and using production factors, expansion of education and the developed and applied scientific work”. [8] Knowledge is an intangible and (almost) immeasurable asset which is implemented into each individual person who is also the carrier of economic activity.

 

Terms”intellectual capital” and “human capital” are with their extent narrower in relation to the term “knowledge”. The author decided to use the term “knowledge” because most of the strategies use the knowledge society vision and knowledge as the main generating factor of the national growth. In the interaction with people “knowledge is defined through the information which has a true value.” [9] The concept about developing knowledge by each individual is being pointed out for the last few years. It has become the guideline and the clear way towards the welfare society. One of the given fundamental goals in the Millennium Declaration is the ambition to ensure obligatory primary education for each girl and boy and to establish equal access (no matter on gender, skin color, nationality, place of residence…) to the education. ?To ensure that, by the same date, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling and that girls and boys will have equal access to all levels of education”. [10]

 

Implementing the concept of knowledge into Croatian economic situation brings unclear conclusions because there are no concrete evidences about which development model Croatia follows and what are the main economic goals. By analyzing economic flows for the last ten years it can be seen that results are becoming more positive, but Croatia is still behind the present development level of European countries. According to political guidelines, their economic level is Croatia’s desirable condition. It is an obvious fact that the competition on the European as on the global market is intensifying. Croatia has tendencies to become one of the participants in the competitive market game by establishing a recognizable socio-cultural identity as a competitive economy. “The competition on the European market and opening Croatian economy to that market are pushing the need to invest more efforts to the idea realization and the model development of the knowledge society which is seen as the imperative of today’s survival and active participation on the global market.” [11]

 

The appearance frequency of the term “knowledge-society” in the national and international development strategies provoked the expansion of debates and scientific arguments. One question appears and moves the boundaries about the understanding national indicators until now. Can we really measure knowledge as the intangible asset? Can the extent of knowledge in national economy be measured?

 

4. INDICATORS FOR MEASURING THE EXTENT OF KNOWLEDGE

 

Throughout the last decade, there have been a lot of discussions which unfortunately remain on theoretical basis - concerning how and how much knowledge influences the macro competitiveness of an economy. There were attempts to create different new indicators in accordance with changes in surroundings; however an international consensus has not yet being reached concerning the statistical coverage of certain elements during the measurement of the degree of knowledge and the human capital of a selected economy. This is why some authors/scientists who deal with these themes are trying to choose variables and measure the extent of knowledge of their native countries and, in that way, compare it with other selected countries. “The analysis and measurement of human capital is thus not about proposing any simple single measure. It is about building new understandings and typologies, supported by indicators that address its multi-faceted, dynamic nature. Such understandings need to relate to people’s experiences both over time and in various settings: “life-long” as well as “life-wide”. [12]

 

This chapter, through the research, defines a new set of knowledge indicators and gives indicators for measuring the extent of knowledge of the Republic of Croatia in the ten years long period from 1994 to 2004.#p#分頁標題#e#

 

4.1. Research on developing indicators

 

During the determination of indicators, the author used the Yearbooks of Croatian Central Bureau of Statistics, bulletins and other published information by Croatian National Bank and state budgets from the web site of the Ministry of Finance.

 

It should be pointed out that gathering wanted indicators was somewhat hard. Even foreign researchers during their research of the human capital reached the conclusion that measuring the human capital is strongly guided by what is possible to measure, rather than by what it is desirable to measure. The same problem exists in Croatia, and that is the insufficient consciousness of need to change the methodology of gathering and processing data and the need for creating additional indicators which should be monitored to get a realistic picture of the condition of human capital.

 

It is also impossible to compare Croatian economy, not to mention new subtle indicators, with other selected countries through a longer period of time because international statistics and international institutions follow Croatian economy in a discontinuous manner and data available is somewhat deficient.

 

The research generated a new modified set of knowledge indicators of the national economy. During the research many divisions have been found but concentrating on the national knowledge itself, the author designed new one (Figure 1). The indicators are divided into three major groups which are structural, human and market indicators. Categorizing indicators and including selected elements was partially based on the scientific paper by Jogesh Malhotra [13] .

 

Bolded elements are those gathered by the author’s research for the period from 1994 to 2004 using Yearbooks of Croatian Central Bureau of Statistics. Some elements (R&D, Internet accesses, and enterprises′ demography) started to be observed statistically after 1994 so the comparison between Croatia in 1994 and Croatia in 2004 was not carried out. The mentioned problem of gathering information is evident because official Croatian data is still not voluminous enough. As mentioned before, international institutions which gather national statistical data (World Bank, UNICEF, UNCTAD…) have recently included Croatia among other countries they monitor, so it is not yet possible to compare their data in a longer period of time.

4.1.1. General indicators [14] in the Republic of Croatia

 

In the time period from 1994 to 2004 population decreased by 7.2%. The median age of the population rose, as did life expectancy both for men and women. Although population decreased, the average number of unemployed people increased, and the share of active population in the total population is lowering. The share of university graduates in the total number of unemployed people is not diminishing.

 

A number of macroeconomic indicators were chosen so that they can give a complete picture of Croatian economy along with demographic indicators. GDP growth rate in 2004 was kept at 3.8%. In the year 2005 the growth rate was 4.3%. Projections of GDP growth talk about the rate of more than 5%, even 8-9%, but those forecasts realistically cannot be considered achievable at this time. GDP per capita in 2004 was about 8000 USD which is a 40% increase comparing to 1994. There has been a great increase in investments in long term property but investments in new capacities have not increased.

 

4.1.2. Indicators for measuring the extent of knowledge in the Republic of Croatia

 

The author singled out indicators of measuring knowledge in the Republic of Croatia with which a clear conclusion about Croatia as a society of knowledge can be made. The most common indicator (in literature) for measuring human capital is observing population above the age of 15 according to finished education. This is the indicator that can be most easily measured but observing only this indicator brings many flaws. Its major weakness is that it does not show the concrete level of skills and abilities of individuals in a society. It also does not include knowledge obtained outside institutions by courses and seminars or the experience gained after education, which is a valuable factor during the determination of labour ability and productivity of an individual.

 

In the observed decade (population census was conducted twice) the number of individuals which did not finish mandatory education i.e. elementary school decreased from 10.1% to 4% (the category of people with unknown education is included) while the number of people with secondary education increased (whether qualified, high-qualified, occupations, gymnasiums). In Croatia, the share of people with university graduates (approximately 8%) is still far way from that indicator for EU or the OECD which is at about 21% [15] .

 

The number of researchers is slightly higher, while the number of published research papers rose by 740% or from 2833 papers in 1994 to 10900 papers in 2004.

 

Isolated indicators are those according to which a conclusion can be reached about whether Croatia is really moving towards a knowledge society. Unfortunately, more complex indicators, which have been collected in developed countries, could not be gathered.

 

That is why this research clearly shows the need to supplement statistical communiqués and publications with contemporary perception of global world about the appearing of new indicators which are in accordance with changes happening inside a society. “Traditional national accounts frameworks were designed in an earlier era when the economy was simpler and the role of knowledge and technical change was not fully acknowledged. As a result, this measurement framework is not offering reasonable explanations for trends in economic growth, productivity and employment.” [17]

 

5. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

 

The primary goal of this paper was to discover the real state of the “knowledge base” in the Republic of Croatia based on gathered indicators from official Croatian statistic publications. The conclusion is that Croatia has not experienced truly significant shifts in the observed period from 1994 to 2004 and that it is still a long way from West-European countries and new member countries with which it can be compared to a certain degree. Demographic structure is not favourable, macroeconomic indicators concerning employment rate are not showing a positive improvement, and chosen indicators of knowledge revealed that Croatia has some positive changes but a lot of effort is needed to achieve a competitive society looking from the human capital aspect.

 

Regardless of the increased number of students enrolled in higher education institutions, the share of graduated students in the total number of enrolled students is at about 13% throughout the whole decade. which shows the inefficiency of the system of education in higher education. Budget expenditures on the education are at a low 8% and education itself is at a 3.5% of GDP. Along with the realistic results, an additional problem is that official Croatian statistics is not yet following the trends that developed countries have and supplementing traditional indicators with modern ones which would follow changes in the global society.

 

Along with the conclusion, the research singled out suggestions to make clear fundamental decisions and improve the education state of Croatian society. “There is no doubt that these issues are among the most important in economics. The success of one generation’s policymakers in learning and heeding the fundamental lessons about economic growth determines what kind of world the next generation will inherit.” [18] Gathering the facts and knowing the specifics of Croatian society was needed to distinguish strategically important decisions which would help creating a national economy development strategy. “Government policies, particularly those relating to science and technology, industry and education, will need a new emphasis in knowledge-based economies. Acknowledgement is needed of the central role of the firm, the importance of national innovation systems and the requirements for infrastructures and incentives which encourage investments in research and training.” [19]

 

Suggestions for improving knowledge as a basic determinant of development and competitiveness of Croatia:

 

Increase expenditures on the education, science and technology, at least to the level of EU countries

 

Increase the efficiency of the system of education (shorten studying duration, increase the percentage of graduated students) through higher flexibility of adopting and modernization of education content

 

Establish cooperation between economy and education by unifying Universities and entrepreneurship

 

Implement the concept of importance of education, knowledge and lifelong learning in strategic decisions on each level of the decision making (local, regional, national)

 

Ensure the intellectual property as a gold mine for national economy

 

Transparent and fair valuation/prising of scientific achievements

 

Make efforts to modernize official statistics

 

Induce investments in new capacities (greenfield investments) and in education and science-research activity (encourage private investments)

 

Encourage employment of hardly employable groups (the young, women, retired) through more efficient measures of active employment policy

 

This series of suggestions is not conclusive, but by their acceptance the results will be positive and Croatian economy will surely be able to offer quality and educated staff with clear signs of the existence of knowledge society. In 2004, the Croatian Academy of Science and Art made a document called Declaration of Knowledge which clearly shows the importance of monitoring world changes and accepting them so that Croatia as a society could become a important participant of global flows of technological achievements, new science solutions, creative innovations and globalizes ideas in general. “In the development of human societies there are times which are more important than others, more critical for the future, more fateful for people and their lives than other periods. Today is that kind of time. In the world today there is a science-technical transformation which, with its far-reaching, can be compared with the Industrial revolution in 18th and 19th century. Not being involved in this transformation means going the wrong way on an important crossroad of history.” [20]