Acta academica karviniensia 2019, 19(1):106-118 | DOI: 10.25142/aak.2019.009

HUMAN RESOURCES AND COMPETITIVENESS OF THE TERRITORY

Anna Vaňová, Janka Šúrová, Mária Seková

Matej Bel University, Faculty of Economics, Tajovského 10, 975 90 Banská Bystrica

The aim of the paper is to point out the importance of human resources, especially creative ones, for the competitive development of the territory. In a globalizing world at the beginning of the 21st century, competitiveness is an indispensable precondition for sustainable land development. Within the framework of competitiveness, the soft and hard factors of the development of the territory are decisive, with a key role played by human resources with innate skills, creativity and talent. Human resources are characterized by flexibility and high migration rates. On the other hand, there are areas for sustainable development that are essential to attract and stabilize high-quality human resources. In this paperwork we present the lessons learned from the study of domestic and foreign scientific resources, own research and empiricism. Primary research collected unique data from Slovakia. On this basis, we identified human resource quality indicators and through quantitative research, we compared territorial disparities of selected indicators to help validate existing theories where creativity and talent are a significant endogenous source of competitive advantage for the territory. At the end of the paperwork, we identified the hard and soft factors that regions should prefer in strategic documents for competitiveness.

Keywords: competitiveness, competitive advantage, creative capital, creative people, creative potential, endogenous factors, region, region development, Slovakia.

JEL classification: R19

Received: October 5, 2018; Revised: November 1, 2018; Accepted: March 6, 2019; Published: March 19, 2019  Show citation