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Against the backdrop of the current political developments in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, such as Ukraine, Poland, and Romania, the question arises as to the role played by economic transformation and the resulting innovation linkages in these countries over the last 20 years. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of economic and institutional dimensions on the development of CEE countries, explicitly distinguishing between European Union (EU) members and non‐members, and thus reflecting the differences in institutions and path dependency. Furthermore, the paper contrasts the performance of CEE countries with that of Western European countries. To achieve these objectives, the impact of factors such as innovation, institutions, and political practices on the economic development of 37 European countries from 2000 until 2020 is followed using fixed effects regression and Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. The results of the analysis show the importance of institutional factors such as low levels of corruption, political freedoms, and intellectual property. The effect of institutional variables was particularly pronounced in the case of non‐EU countries, which indicates the particular importance of the development of stable institutions for achieving higher levels of economic development for this category of countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper provides new evidence on barriers that hamper small and medium‐sized enterprises (SME) in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) to establish international collaboration. Our analysis makes use of collected data concerning internationalization of SMEs in seven BSR countries. Our logistic multivariate regression model, which we applied after selecting relevant variables using the LASSO method, indicates a significant positive effect for the entities´ demand in support to acquire clients as well as the absence of foreign markets operations. A significant adverse effect is found for cooperation agreements as a support tool for internationalization as well as the interest to participate in an innovation and internationalization system. SMEs rather desire their internationalization capacity building than direct support in acquiring clients. Overall, our results support the hypothesis that strengthening cross‐national collaborations and establishing appropriate support programs are important toward innovativeness and competitiveness among SMEs in the BSR. Smart Specialization Strategies (S3) could provide a framework for building cross‐national collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]