Using Project Funding for Advancing Regional Competitiveness

The idea that regional competitiveness can be fostered and managed to enhance national competitiveness has gained increasing acceptance in the scientific community in recent years. Based on this, several initiatives have been developed and implemented to enhance the company's competitiveness in specific target regions of Europe and Bulgaria through targeted project financing. Many authors develop and improve methods for assessing a company's competitiveness by concentrating on specific components such as marketing and market management, innovation and entrepreneurship, leadership in human capital management, and more. Based on this, various nations create and carry out financial initiatives to enhance business competitiveness; unfortunately, the impacts of these initiatives have not been the focus of economic or social research. Accordingly, the primary goal of this paper is to investigate and evaluate the concept of Total factor productivity model (TFP) on (regional) competitiveness as well as to examine the impact of project funding on regional competitiveness by comparing the project –based fields and importance of regional competitiveness drivers (RCI). The analysis indicates that regional competitiveness is not directly correlated with national competitiveness, as regional governments must implement targeted competitiveness policies. Ultimately, as illustrated by the Kardzhali example, local governments should more effectively investigate the factors influencing regional competitiveness rather than concentrating solely on national aspects. The limitation of this paper is that regional competitiveness is calculated only for a single NUTS region in Bulgaria, in comparison to national competitiveness data.