ES šalių konkurencingumo vertinimas ir klasterizavimas ; Evaluation of competitiveness and clustering of the EU countries
The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the orientation towards climate change neutrality have fundamentally changed the way we look at competitiveness. Global challenges have increased interest in countries' competitiveness. Thus, in the final master's project the competitiveness of the European Union countries is evaluated according to the most important determinants, ecological footprint and the countries are clustered according to the obtained analysis results. In the literature review the latest concept of competitiveness is presented, 9 groups of competitiveness factors and 52 factors-indicators are identified. The missing values are filled in by MICE method, and after evaluating the correlation, 42 factors-indicators are further used in the study. Three methods are used for clustering - hierarchical Ward linkage method, K-means and machine learning method t-SNE. After the cluster analysis, the countries are clustered into four groups. Neighboring countries have been found to be most similar in terms of competitiveness. Country cluster profiles are interpreted using the results of the PCA method. According to the identified groups of factors, the competitiveness index developed by the author of the project revealed that the most competitive EU countries are Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. The least competitive countries are Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. Assessing the link between the ecological footprint and competitiveness, positive progress is seen in the EU. In addition, EU countries are moving from low competitiveness and low ecological footprint to high competitiveness and low ecological footprint.