The Impact of Clusters on Employment Development in Regions of the Slovak Republic

The issue of clusters creation and the study of their impact on individual social and economic indicators of the development of enterprises, regions or countries, especially Central Europe, have not yielded the expected results, yet. Provable evidence of the impact of clusters and cluster policies on social or economic development remains an open question because of the analyzes and findings made in most cases were not so convincing as possible. However, the practice of clustering and its exploration in some advanced European countries has relevant results. Therefore, despite these negative results, we will try to find out and point to the role of clusters in the development of the Slovak republic as well. These findings will focus mainly on the development of employment, structural changes and competitiveness in the individual regions under the influence of the creation or operation of existing clusters. We consider this task as a main goal of our study. In addition to analyzing employment and unemployment (matching time series) in individual regions in which clusters operate, we will examine also the role of cluster through a localization quotient (examining the importance of the sector as a result of regional employment), local employment (by looking at employment in the area in which the clusters operate) and analysis of structural changes (shift-share analysis of the region's competitiveness), thanks to what we could monitor the impact and importance of individual clusters in the regions, both in terms of territorial and also national.