The impact of tourism services development on income inequality in Kazakhstan’s regions

Using a panel of 28 European Union countries for the period 2003–2014, the authors provide empirical evidence for the relationship between innovation, technological specialization, and income inequality. The results of the fixed effect panel regressions show two important findings. Firstly, the positive link was found between innovation, as measured by patenting activities, and income inequality as measured by Gini index and the top 10% income shares of the richest. Secondly, the authors also found the positive correlation between technological specialization, as measured by the Coefficient of Variances (CV) of Revealed Technological Advantage Index, and income inequality. Overall, the study enriches the previous literature suggesting that innovation may increase the gap of income distribution through the mechanism of Skill-Biased Technical Change (SBTC) and the Schumpeterian view of entrepreneurial rent. More importantly, this study is the first which found that not only the level of innovation does matter to the income distribution, but also how the innovation activities are specialized or diversified. Concentrating the activities into few narrow sectors (i.e., increase technological specialization) may also lead to the increase of income inequality.

Purposeful and reasonable state vision of the long-term tourism development strategy determines the success of a country in the world market of tourist services. Many countries have officially approved program documents that clearly outline the main goals and objectives of the state policy in the sphere of tourism, highlighting the resource potential, recreational infrastructure and preferred consumer markets, but there may be no idea of respecting the interests of domestic consumers. The maintenance of local tourism infrastructure is becoming an increasingly important prerequisite for the country’s competitiveness, as mass tourism is now replaced by individual travels. The article is aimed at studying the dependencies between the main macroeconomic indicators of the tourism industry, assessing the efficiency of foreign trade. The correlation-regression and cluster analysis has been used in order to confirm or refute the hypothesis if the effectiveness of the state support of the national tourism industry is dependent on the stable functioning of the domestic tourism market, e.g. stimulation of travels by residents. Based on the main macroeconomic indicators of the tourism industry for 136 countries of the world and overview of some national tourism development program, the analysis output has rejected the direct correlation between the support of the domestic market and export potential of the national tourism industry, but has proved the significance of the inner consumer power during the periods of downturns in the global economy for strengthening the country’s export potential.

The focus of the research is to develop recommendations of smart specialization (SS) for Ukrainian policymakers using European approaches. The authors revealed that the main SS projects are presented in such sectors as agri-food, industrial modernization and energy. More than 12 EU countries were the plot for conducted analysis of SS, as a result of which the level of activity of each country was determined. The creation of consortiums, including SMEs, associations, universities and other participants, disclosed the successful way of SS realization. The structure of SME’s innovative potential in Ukraine was identified underlining their main characteristic features like types of innovations and innovative activity, differentiation according to enterprise size, their regional distribution. The authors explored lack of innovations on regional and national level and significant territorial disparities, which could be eliminated through policy implementation of regional SS. The existing legislative norms for possibility of SS implementation in Ukraine were analyzed due to correspondence with the EU ones. The analysis provides the opportunity to consider them only as general framework documents without any action plans and sectoral prioritization at all. The weak points of these law documents are emphasized. As a result of research, the authors developed recommendations presented by direct action plan for Ukrainian policymakers, which include such activities as underlining key priorities (especially ICT applicability in every SS project) and their correspondence with the EU ones; eliminating regional imbalances by focusing on innovation development and reorientation of some regions according to SS priorities; respecting regional existing capacities; providing organizational mechanism for cooperation of stakeholders and financial mechanism for SS support through the EU structural funds.