DOI: 10.32725/978-80-7394-976-1.19

Challenges and opportunities for the Economies

Jaroslav Vlach

Current economic, social, and political development in the world brings changes in the condition of individual economies as well as their competitiveness, the use of new technologies, and innovations. Thanks to COVID-19 and the Ukrainian conflict, we are even talking about a crisis. The pace of coping with difficulties, i.e., crisis and overcoming obstacles depends above all on the strength of a particular economy, on the innovativeness of its companies and management, i.e., science, research, innovations, and experiences from everyday life. But it also depends on the cyclical phases of the life of the particular society, because the course of history is not just a linear process. The goal of this paper is to search the answers for the following questions with using the secondary data.Can the current emphasis (at least in our conditions) on science, research, innovation be a brake and at the same time a way out of this crisis? Or are they just buzzwords like perestroika and glasnost in the second half of the 1980s? Communists in the former Soviet bloc looked up to them with the hope that they would save that social order. Socialism was supposed to be reformed and consolidated through them. In the end, it ended up in the abyss of history. Is today's overuse of the words – development, research, innovation, science – the realization of our political and economic elites that we are at the end, because nothing grows forever and that we are facing a slow, cascading, or rapid fall, and science, research, innovation, agile management are an attempt to slow down the fall? I believe in a person as a bearer of ideas, not in repeating buzzwords. The EU approved many tools and platforms to support R&D for which it has released large sums of money, but the whole European perspective regarding to its own birth rates isn’t good.

Keywords: economy, political, innovation, competitiveness, reformation

pages: 122-127