R19 - General Regional Economics: OtherReturn

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.

One of the most prominent features of the contemporary retail-trade in Slovakia is imminently its concentration and changing structure of the retail network where small stores and self-service stores were replaced by large-scale business formats like supermarkets, hypermarkets and discount stores. In the scope of the retail-trade, the localization decision making is very important since a mistake in the decision and a following inconvenient location of the retail unit leads mainly to serious trade difficulties and subsequently to the crash of the store. The evaluation of the development of retail networks in regions of the Slovak Republic was realized on the basis of selected indicators of the localization and the concentration. Based on the analysis of the concentration and the localization of the retail network in regions of the Slovak Republic conducted, it can be stated that the Bratislava region demonstrates a significant dominance in the monitored period.

Within the research project "WD-55-07-1: Regional Disparities in the Land Development of the Czech Republic - Their Origin, Identification And Elimination", we deal with in the past three years, we focused our attention on how their own definition of regional disparities and to find appropriate methods that would be useful in measuring interregional differences. During the past three years, we have our research concluded that the assessment of regional disparities, we can use two basic approaches. One possibility is the disparities present in a material respect, which is our proposed integrated indicators, which we addressed for example in the essay "Practical Application of Methods for Assessment of Regional Disparities", which was published in the previous issue of Acta Academica karviniensis. Another option is to assess interregional differences from a purely user point of view, the use of a higher degree of aggregation, making it subsequently formed model specific regions, enabling us to evaluate each county with more complexity than is the case with integrated indicators. This second alternative approach to the assessment of regional disparities records then become a "Model Regions and Their Possible Use in the Evaluation of Regional Disparities, in which they are presented as types of model proposed by us region and demonstration of their practical use, and the example of the region with versatile living conditions.