Higher Education and Training as Crucial Pillars in Creating the Competitiveness of Nation

The article tries to accent that one of the fundamental challenges and tasks of the contemporary national economies in an effort to create and maintain competitiveness is to develop and upgrade the human capital through a qualitative educational system and a system of continuous training of the workforce. Using the data from the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Global Competitiveness Reports the paper presents the interdependence between the quality of the educational and training system and the level of competitiveness. The paper is focused on the South East European (SEE) countries and the quality of their educational and training system as one of the reason of their competitiveness lag. Through the correlation index the paper confirms the differences in relationship of education and training/competitiveness index between SEE, Central European and Baltics (CEB) economies and some EU members.