Knowledge services level and their impact on Czech economic sustainability

Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) in particular have emerged as a dynamic industry supplying for instance, management consulting, accounting, legal, marketing, and personnel services. KIBS organizations are private service businesses that sell their services on markets to other businesses and organizations (Miles, 2003). As such, KIBS represent a subset of Knowledge intensive service activities (KISA) that has an important role in the innovation system. They have been studied as an industry in their own right. For example, accounting and legal solutions are sold, even exported, and the growth rate of these kinds at businesses is significant (Toivonen, 2004; Miles, 1993).

However, Knowledge intensive business services are not the only source of knowledge-intensive services. KISA is a wider concept including activities carried out by private and the public sector service suppliers as well as services produced within the organizations.

In the effort to achieve the main aims of the paper task, it seemed essential to investigate the economic level of Knowledge Services and this by means of a comparative analysis of selected OECD countries.

Subsequently, based on the acquired data, we perform a synthesis and formulate a generalisation of the characteristics of the level of Knowledge Services in the Czech Republic. The subsidiary aims of this part of the research project were:

To characterise the economic level of individual OECD economies (by means of economic indices: the evolution of GDP in market prices (%); the average annual growth rate (AAGR) from value-added, according to the High-tech and KIS sectors, EU-27 - 2000-2005 and the evolution of the share of workers in Knowledge Services)

To determine the economic value-added of enterprises belonging to the Knowledge Services – i.e. Knowledge intensive services, Less knowledge intensive services (using as indices the number of enterprises, turnover in thou. EUR or the overall costs for the sale of goods and services in thou. EUR, and the average personal costs per employee in thou. EUR).

Within the framework of this comparison of data, it is important to point out that such an exhaustive research project has never been conceived in the Czech Republic before.

Jel: E66

Key words: Knowledge services, economic level, Knowledge intensive services (KIS), Knowledge intensive business services (KIBS).