The sustainable competitiveness of nations

Sten Thore and Ruzanna Tarverdyan

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2016, vol. 106, issue C, 108-114

Abstract: Is it possible for a country to be commercially competitive and at the same time protect the environment and social welfare? The recent (2011) initiative by the World Economic Forum to complement their well-known competitiveness rankings of nations with data on sustainability is here reinterpreted in terms of a general model of social and economic policy, using productivity and sustainability variables as policy goals, and the eleven so-called “pillars” of the Forum as policy instruments. Aiming further than just calculating a simple index, however, we consider the full multi-dimensional problem facing each nation maximizing its social preference for the goals, given its corresponding social policy costs. The solution to this optimization problem splits the nations into two categories: (i) those achieving the maximally doable, tracing the “frontier” or upper envelope to the scatter of data points and (ii) sub-optimal and thus under-achieving nations falling behind the envelope. Using the Forum data for 125 nations in 2013, we identify the frontier and sub-frontier nations. For each suboptimal nation we identify its “peers” on the frontier suggesting how its sustainable competitiveness might be improved.

Keywords: Global competitiveness index; World Economic Forum; US Council of Competitiveness; Millennium development goals; SDGs; Sustainable development goals; Data envelopment analysis; Frontier analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:106:y:2016:i:c:p:108-114

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2016.02.017

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