Impact of the universities on regional development in the Slovak Republic

In contrast to the traditional view on economics, related to productivity and economic growth, we focus our attention on the development of modern technologies, services, and the knowledge economy. The fast pace of technology innovations requires higher-quality education. In this matter, the objects of the research are universities that influence the population and economic development as well as the regional development as one of the involved institutions. The paper deals with the contextual analysis of the university environment within the conditions of regions in the Slovak Republic upon the selected subindexes, such as macroeconomic performance and stability, innovation policy, institutional quality, and the quality of human resources. The differences between the regions are analyzed through the Index of the quality of regional university environment (IQRUE) that enabled to recognize these differences better. The ranking of the regions has been created according to a daily index when interpreting the results by the comparison of each region. The Pearson’s correlation coefficient and Spearman’s ranking correlation coefficient were used to testing the relationship between GDP and science and research expenses. The results are presented in the tables and graphs. The conducted research enabled the identification of the deficiencies of the university environment in every region of Slovakia. As a result, some universities are disadvantaged within the competition. Continuous elimination of deficiencies should not be a priority of universities only, however, the entire society should prioritize it. The state, local self-government bodies should play the leading role to create the conditions to improve the quality of the university environment and pay attention mostly to the disadvantaged regions.