The paper is concerned with the best constants in the Bernstein and Markov inequalities on a compact set $E\subset {ℂ}^N$. We give some basic properties of these constants and we prove that two extremal-like functions defined in terms of the Bernstein constants are plurisubharmonic and very close to the Siciak extremal function ${\Phi }_E$. Moreover, we show that one of these extremal-like functions is equal to ${\Phi }_E$ if E is a nonpluripolar set with $li{m}_{n\to \infty }Mₙ{\left(E\right)}^{1/n}=1$ where $Mₙ\left(E\right):=sup{\left|\right|\left|gradP\right|\left|\right|}_E/{\left|\right|P\left|\right|}_E$, the supremum is taken over all polynomials P of N variables of total...