Revisiting an Evasive Concept: Introduction to the Special Issue on Competitiveness
Karl Aiginger
Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade, 2006, vol. 6, issue 2, 63-66
Abstract:
The term competitiveness stems from the analysis of firms and is usually thought to be well defined at the firm level. Today, however, the notion competitiveness has become a prominent concept in the assessment of countries, regions and locations. The competitive advantage of nations and the competitiveness of locations have become important topics in economic policy. Interest in this field has been notably stimulated by the work of Michael Porter. Although the diversity of approaches presented in this issue may appear large to the reader, it is in reality dwarfed by the multiplicity of concepts, articles and books which have been written in reference to the term competitiveness. The vagueness of the general term, the lack of theoretical background, implicit preferences and prejudices, and finally the scope of policy recommendations made in reference to this term have induced outstanding researchers to warn that the term competitiveness of a nation could be dangerous, obsessive, elusive or meaningless. 1 The articles presented in this volume share some elements of this critique, but also demonstrate that research is being continued, and that it is indeed relevant to the design and evaluation of economic policy, most notably, the so-called Lisbon Strategy of the European Union. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006
Keywords: competitiveness; welfare evaluation; innovation; Lisbon Strategy; F10; F15; F43; O31; O40; O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10842-006-9471-x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jincot:v:6:y:2006:i:2:p:63-66
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... on/journal/10842/PS2
DOI: 10.1007/s10842-006-9471-x
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade is currently edited by Karl Aiginger, Marcel Canoy and Michael Peneder
More articles in Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().