COMPETITIVENESS OF THE COUNTRIES OF SOUTHEAST EUROPE IN THE ERA OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The economic development of economies around the world, accompanied by growing globalization, which is manifested through increasing openness and strengthening of integration processes, puts pressure on the factors that are the basis of their economic power. In the analytical sense, the international comparison of the most important determinants of countries' success, ie the factors that predominantly influence the growth of labor productivity and the creation of competitive advantages of companies and countries in an increasingly open and integrated international market, has gained importance. The competitiveness of a country is determined by the ability of economic institutions to create conditions that are most conducive to business development, on the one hand, and the ability of firms to take advantage of these conditions to create sustainable competitive advantages, on the other. The world economy is undergoing a continuous process of division and change of work, creating an even wider space for the processes of exchange and improving the competitiveness of companies in domestic and foreign markets, and thus the competitiveness and development of countries as a whole. The current level of economic development requires many countries to focus on qualitative factors in an effort to increase their competitiveness. The key factor in increasing the competitiveness of modern economies is increasingly becoming the innovation capacity of companies, which through innovative business processes are transformed into innovative capabilities of the economy as a whole.In 2018, the World Economic Forum introduced the new Global Competitiveness Index 4.0 as a new economic roadmap, based on forty years of experience in monitoring and comparing long-term competitiveness factors.This index provides a detailed overview of the factors and characteristics that determine productivity, growth and human development in the era of the fourth industrial revolution. The index is based on economic growth theory and aims to measure the drivers of 'total factor productivity' (TFP), that is, a portion of economicThe paper examines the competitive performance of eleven countries in Southeast Europe in the period 2017-2019. year according to the value of the Global Competitiveness Index 4.0. In 2019, the highest value of the Global Competitiveness Index 4.0. Among the countries of Southeast Europe, Bulgaria had (64.9 index points on a scale from 0 to 100), and the lowest was Bosnia and Herzegovina (54.7 index points). In 2019, compared to the previous year, the countries of Southeast Europe increased their competitiveness by 0.8 index points (from 59.6 to 60.4 points). Among the countries of Southeast Europe in the period 2017-2019. BiH (+0.9 points), Greece (+0.8 points), Turkey (+0.7 points) and Albania (+0.3 index points) also increased, but more slowly than the average of Southeast European countries.