Abstract
Since the 1990s of the twentieth century onward, Central-Eastern European countries have been extensively involved in these two processes—regarding increasing share of ICT and high-tech exports in country’s total export value—and additionally, across these economies, changes in the level of access to and use of ICT have been observed. The main target of this research is to contribute to the present state of the art, by proving extensive empirical evidence on firm internationalization, demonstrated through intensification of technology-driven export activities, across seven selected (Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia) Central-Eastern European countries, between 1995 and 2015. To this aim, we use data from OECD STAN Bilateral Trade in Goods by Industry and End Use Database (ISIC Rev.3 and ISIC Rev.4) on high-tech, ICT, and low-tech export (as share of total export). Methodological framework combines descriptive statistics, logistic growth models and technological substitution models, which allow for unveiling examined tendencies across analyzed countries.
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Notes
- 1.
Note, in our work, “high-tech export” always refers to value of export of goods produced in high-technology industry, expressed as share of total value of export in a given country; “ICT export” refers to value of export of goods produced in ICT industry, expressed as share of total value of export in a given country; “low-tech export” refers to value of export of goods produced in low-technology industry, expressed as share of total value of export in a given country.
- 2.
Nonparametric density estimation using Kernel smoothing.
- 3.
Technically, Fig. 1 shows the smoothed distribution of the points—in here values of high-tech and ICT export, along numerical axis. The peaks of each distribution present locations where the highest concentration of given points is observed.
- 4.
Following Eq. (6), we estimate two models, which for high-tech export pattern is as
\( {\mathrm{EXP}}_i^{\mathrm{HT}}(t)=\frac{\kappa_i^{\mathrm{HT}}}{1+ \exp\ \left(-{\alpha}_i^{\mathrm{HT}}\left( t-{\beta}_i^{\mathrm{HT}}\right)\right)} \) and for ICT export pattern \( {\mathrm{EXP}}_i^{\mathrm{ICT}}(t)=\frac{\mathrm{ICT}}{1+ \exp\ \left(-{\alpha}_i^{\mathrm{ICT}}\left( t-{\beta}_i^{\mathrm{ICT}}\right)\right)}, \) where i denotes country.
- 5.
In this section, we concentrate exclusively on high-tech export and do not consider ICT export separately. Bearing in mind the results presented in Sect. 5.1, we find out that across examined countries, high-tech export is mainly driven by ICT export, and as these two overlap, there is no need to provide separate evidence for potential ‘low-tech to ICT export’ substitution process.
- 6.
We use the methodological framework as presented in Sect. 3 and estimate the model of substitution between high-tech and low-tech export patterns, which is: \( {f}_i^{\mathrm{HT}}(t)+{f}_i^{\mathrm{LT}}(t)=1 \) or
\( \frac{\kappa_i^{\mathrm{HT}}}{1+ \exp \left(-{\alpha}_i^{\mathrm{HT}}\left( t-{\beta}_i^{\mathrm{HT}}\right)\right)}+\frac{\kappa_i^{\mathrm{LT}}}{1+ \exp \left(-{\alpha}_i^{\mathrm{LT}}\left( t-{\beta}_i^{\mathrm{LT}}\right)\right)}=1 \), where i is still country.
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Acknowledgments
This research has been supported by the project no. UMO-2015/19/B/HS4/03220 financed by the National Science Centre, Poland.
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Lechman, E. (2017). Technology-Driven Internationalization: Central-Eastern European Perspective. In: Sauka, A., Chepurenko, A. (eds) Entrepreneurship in Transition Economies. Societies and Political Orders in Transition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57342-7_5
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