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Global financial crisis influenced almost all sectors in national economies of individual countries, affecting the social sectors such as healthcare one significantly. In many countries, the health systems are mostly financed by public budget. Therefore the effective use of public money comes into attention, especially in crisis years (Androniceanu & Ohanyan, 2016). Therefore performance measurement in the public healthcare systém has become a more and more popular research challenge throughout Europe and the world. It is significantly associated with the global process of demographic ageing and increasing demands on health and social system in each country (Marešová et al., 2015a).

Business environment is An important determinant of national competitiveness and sustainable long-term economic growth. Business environment quality determines the risk as well as returns from investment and therefore affects investment decisions. The business environment is largely, if not totally, beyond the control of the firms and their management. It results from existing political, legal and regulatory framework; macroeconomic policies; institutional infrastructure; social and cultural context within which transactions take place, the quality of physical and social infrastructure and many other factors. Empirical research has shown that corruption represents a serious obstacle to entrepreneurship and business (Kaufmann & Wei, 2000; Meon & Sekkat, 2005). Hellman et al. (2000) consider corruption, in addition to governance quality and state capture, a factor that significantly shapes business environment in transition countries.

Family businesses all over the world are suffering from long-term survival problems (Miller et al., 2004; Salvato & Leif, 2008) despite financially outperforming in the short run (Dyer, 2006; Villalonga & Amit, 2006). Meanwhile, general business literature agrees that if a business outperforms in accumulating more resources in the short run, it has a greater propensity to sustain in the long run (Efrat & Shoham, 2012). In this case, despite the diverse ideologies, the short term in this paper is termed to be less than three years. The simple question arising from these two research findings is why family businesses are not as sustainable in the long run if they can outperform in the short run?

Research and development (R&D) is of fundamental importance in the creation of knowledge, products and technologies (Solow, 1956; Jones, 1995; Köhler et al., 2012; OECD, 2012; Szarowská, 2016; 2017). Generally, governments have three main instruments for financing R&D (own R&D, direct funding and indirect funding), each of which has advantages and disadvantages from the perspective of economic theory (David et al., 2000). The financial crisis prompted many governments to introduce tough fiscal consolidation measures and to prioritize other issues over R&D. However, Hud and Hussinger (2015) note that to prevent firms from reducing their R&D expenses and to maintain national R&D capacities, policymakers in many countries reacted immediately to the crisis and increased the public R&D budget.

According to Shah (2015), economic growth is a primary and crucial aim of national and regional economies. International trade, based on exploitation of the benefits of comparative advantage, is treated as one of the key Determinants of a sustainable economic growth. Being a structural part of the overal international trade, the international trade in agricultural products is an important engine of economic progress. Despite the abundance of the scientific studies proving the positive links between international trade and national and/or regional economic growth (Sun & Heshmati, 2010; Adhikary, 2010; Busse & Koniger, 2012; Fetahi-Vehapia & Sadikub, 2015; Vojtovic, 2016; Kljucnikov & Popesko, 2017; Weng et al., 2017, Simionescu et al., 2017 etc.), the international trade in agricultural products thus far has not earned the sufficient scientific attention.