The investment attractiveness of countries: coupling between core dimensions

Ongoing economic development provokes the intensification of competition on the global market, requiring developing countries to offer affordable conditions for attracting new labour and financial resources. At the same time, foreign investors and skilled labour forces focus on countries with a high level of investment attractiveness. The paper aims to estimate the coordination and degree of coupling between the dimensions of investment attractiveness, defining the internal and external dimensions of investment attractiveness in order to do so. The internal dimensions included five groups of indicators: socio-economic, infrastructural, innovation/research, energy resources, and agricultural dimensions. Based on entropy methods, the authors developed an approach to assessing the degree of coupling between the core dimensions of investment attractiveness. The countries which were the subjects of the investigation for the period of 2000-2020 were Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Poland, and Ukraine. The analysed data was obtained from the World Data Bank. The findings showed that Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Romania had the highest degree of coupling of integrated investment attractiveness in 2018-2020, Poland in 2018, and Ukraine in 2008. The results of pairwise and integrated assessment of coordination and interconnection between the core dimensions of investment attractiveness allowed for the identification of both positive and negative trends in the change thereof, justifying the governmental