COMPETITIVENESS: FROM MICROECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS TO NATIONAL DETERMINANTS

This paper is a survey of economic literature related to competitiveness and its definition. The conceptual framework introduced by Michael Porter in 1990 remains exceptionally influential, but there are economists, like Krugman which consider the concept of national competitiveness as irrelevant or ambiguous. The aim of this paper is to provide a coherent representation of the meaning of competitiveness. We make the distinction between macroeconomic and microeconomic competitiveness, arguing that are strongly related. We can say that in last years the competitiveness literature is moving toward a convergent understanding of the concept and different ways to define and measure competitiveness have a lot in common.