Impact of Science, Education and Healthcare on Labor Productivity in the NMS-11

The objective of this study is to investigate the influence of science, education and healthcare on labour productivity in the new European Union (EU) member states from Central and Eastern Europe – Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia, which are known as the NMS-11. An autoregressive distributed lag approach (ARDL) and annual data for the NMS-11 over the period 2013-2023 are employed in the analysis. The results from the empirical research imply that in the long run, real labour productivity in the NMS-11 as a whole and individually can be encouraged by increasing the spending on healthcare, the expenses on research and development (R&D) and the share of the population with tertiary education. In the short run, in the NMS-11 as a group, the R&D spending and the percentage of tertiary education graduates do not affect real labour productivity, whereas healthcare expenditures have a negative impact on it.