COMPETITIVENESS IN THE ECONOMIC CONCEPTS, THEORIES AND EMPIRICAL RESEARCH

Abstract

The objective of this study is to analyze the competitiveness through the prism of its theoretical background, methods of empirical estimation and influence factors. This paper contributes to the theoretical research on competitiveness not only by the synthesis of old and new writings as well as the findings of the exploratory studies, but also by concept synthesis of competitiveness. Since the concept of competitiveness can be reported to individual product/service, enterprise/farm, industry, economic sector, region, nation or international economic blocks, the attempts towards creating one common definition of competitiveness seem to be doomed to fail. Thus, our study does not answer the question which of the definitions proposed in the literature best capture commonly used notions of competitiveness, but our concern is about the ambiguity of those definitions which hampers the measurement and comparison of competitiveness. In order to mirror complexity of the aspects referring to the competitiveness we suggest using composite indicators to measure competitiveness. An important limitation of the empirical research on competitiveness is imperfect comparability of results across studies using different variables (features) describing competitiveness.