DOING BUSINESS IN CENTRAL EUROPE: THE SLOVAK REPUBLIC AND THE CZECH REPUBLIC COMPARISON

Abstract

At the time of globalization the business environment of the country has a crucial impact on its attractiveness for investments and the economic development. The aim of this paper is to discover the effectiveness of developing attractive doing business environment in the Slovak Republic and the Czech Republic. As a methodological basis in the current paper were used the Global Competitiveness Report, Doing Business Index, the Index of Economic Freedom and their corresponding indicators to analyze the business environment and the attractiveness of the countries in terms of foreign direct investments. We examined the ranking of both countries in the relevant international rankings of indices impacting the business environment, as well as in terms of FDI attractiveness. The results show that the Czech Republic is more successful in terms of doing business. Based on the results we can conclude that the main advantages of Czech Republic compared to Slovakia are the higher effectiveness in terms of administrative requirements and  entrepreneurial culture, getting electricity access, protecting minority investors, resolving insolvency and all economic freedom indicators except for investment freedom.