Editorial

Welcome to the first issue of the International Journal of Management and Economics in 2020. The current issue contains six papers covering various areas in management and economics. Five of them are based on original empirical research. There is also one conceptual paper. The geographical scope of this issue is mainly Europe, with a particular perspective of Poland’s membership in the European Union.

Alina Szypulewska-Porczyńska and Magdalena Suska, in the first article entitled “15 years of Poland’s membership of the European Union: Poland’s participation in the internal market for services”, examine the changes in Poland’s integration into the EU internal market for services in the legal context of legal solutions related to the free movement of services, namely, the Service Directive. The authors conclude that the role of changes in regulatory trade barriers have had a modest impact on Polish integration with the EU internal market for services. Structural and macroeconomic factors seem to be far more important drivers of integration and growing asymmetry between the exports and imports sides of the Polish service sector.

In the second paper, “Poland in the single European market – changes in the similarity of import and export structures in comparison to the EU-10 countries in 2004–2017”, Wojciech Polan and Edward Molendowski study the export and import patterns between the new (EU-10) and old (EU-15) member states of the European Union. In the period under examination, they find convergence of the commodity structures of Polish foreign trade with both the EU-10 and the EU-15 countries. They conclude that such a progressing unification of the foreign trade system reflects the recognition of both areas as a single market. Additionally, it is worth underlining that Polish producers and exporters, to a much greater degree, took advantage of the changed trade conditions resulting from EU accession than their peers from other new member states.

Magdalena Łada and Małgorzata Juchniewicz, in the paper entitled “Diversification of the competitive position of the advanced technology sector in EU”, aim to assess the competitive position of the advanced technology sector in the EU countries. Based on a number of measures, the authors propose a synthetic indicator of competitive position and construct a ranking of EU states with the most competitive advanced technology sectors.

The next paper, entitled “The comparative analysis of the industrial relations systems in Europe”, is by Rałał Towalski and Juliusz Gardawski. The authors study the industrial relations systems in 11 Central and Eastern European countries (CEE11) and seek institutional similarities with each of the four models of capitalism in Western Europe identified by Amable [2003]. They use three variables representing inputs or institutional determinants of industrial relations and another three variables representing outputs or the labor market performance. For each variable, the similarity coefficients between the CEE11 countries and four reference EU15 economies representing the Western European models of capitalism were calculated. The analysis led to a number of interesting conclusions about the evolvement of capitalism models in Central and Eastern European states over the past 15 years.

The fifth article, “Intangible assets in the process of internationalization”, is by Łukasz Bryl. The paper includes an extensive literature review and meta-analysis of the link between numerous forms of intangible assets possessed by firms and various forms of internationalization from different international backgrounds.

In the final paper of this issue, entitled “Long-term evolution of the subsidiary’s role - a qualitative perspective on a subsidiary located in Poland”, Marlena Dzikowska and Marian Gorynia offer an in-depth literature review and an empirical case study of a foreign subsidiary located in Poland. They examine a 10-year period of operations of a foreign subsidiary active in the automotive industry. Their analysis shows that the evolution of the subsidiary role includes elements such as markets served, functional areas of operations, and the degree of complication of operations. The paper also describes the complex relations among the factors related to the subsidiary, the headquarters, and the elements of the environment of the subsidiary.

We hope you will find the International Journal of Management and Economics an inspiring source of information. Please enjoy reading!