CLUSTERS AND CONCENTRATION OF BUSINESSES IN REGIONS OF SOME EUROPEAN COUNTRIES AS TOOLS FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT.

In our paper we made an overview on the literature about the creation and role of clusters and concentration of economic activities in the development of regions in Europe. Based on data available, we tried to find the correlation between the welfare, the quality of life and the clusters (especially in the knowledgeintensive sectors). In our research we assumed that the concentration of a sector in a region can have influence on the quality of life and that higher knowledge-intensive sectors of manufacturing and services have greater contribution to welfare. During research two main questions may arise: After how many years can we see beneficial effects on quality of life if a region starts to specialize. And: Can quality of life react flexibly to the changes in economy? After our research we got to the conclusion that there is a time shift in this phenomenon, the correlation is not linear and the changes are not elastic. We assumed that knowledge-driven economy has greater effect on quality of life than traditional economy but this cannot be proven generally. Moreover, regional specialties in labor market and industrial traditions seem to have great impact. We collected the data from the Eurostat database. The sample data give the opportunity to calculate the labor based location quotient (LQ), Herfindahl index and Dissimilarity index as well. All the three indices can show us the same effects that we are interested, but we have chosen LQ for our research. Eurostat has a so called high-tech industry and knowledgeintensive service database, which was used and filtered to the employment data in order to calculate the labor based LQ. The database lasts from 1994 to 2008 and shows the employment in the different knowledge intensive sectors on regional levels in 33 countries. The aim of our research was to find out how much the clusters/economic concentrations affect the development of regions and to try to define possible development ways for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]