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The purpose of this paper is to attempt to develop a measure of competitive advantage by identifying a stipulative definition, composing an operational definition and constructing a measurement variable.

The paper undertakes critical literature review, cognitive interviews as well as a pilot and full study, which were carried out by applying a cross-sectional, self-administered e-mail survey with questionnaire in a fillable text-processing file, in order to develop a valid and reliable measure of competitive advantage.

The results have led to the identification of a conceptually robust stipulative definition, the composition of a comprehensive operational definition and the construction of a qualified variable, making the development of a valid and reliable measure of competitive advantage possible.

The newly developed measure of competitive advantage, exempt from past conceptual problems, could be used for valid measurements in future empirical studies in the field of strategic management. At the same time, authors encourage future tests of the newly developed measure's reliability and validity.

The provision of a conceptually clear stipulating definition and a comprehensive operational definition for competitive advantage could increase practicing managers’ awareness relating to the conceptual nature as well as the latent expressions of competitive advantage.

The findings contribute to the evolution of the strategic management field by providing a valid and reliable measure of competitive advantage that is applicable under any leading theoretical perspective in strategic management and it could better serve the needs of both empirical research and management practice.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the way competitiveness is measured matters, as well as to analyze the relationship between tax burden and economic competitiveness using a variety of model specifications.

This paper uses statistical models aimed at finding the relationship between taxes and different measures of economic competitiveness, such as gross domestic product per capita, employment and a third-party competitiveness index. Other variables are also considered, and statistical procedures such as lag specifications and “white period” errors are used to address problems of endogeneity and serial correlation.

The models find no robust relationship between taxes and competitiveness. Certain models find correlations between the tax burden of specific income groups with economic competitiveness, but these vary in direction and are difficult to interpret. This follows past research, which shows different results depending on the period analyzed, measure of competitiveness and other variables used.

This paper looks at many of the different measures of competitiveness, control variables and periods that are used in the previous literature and shows how any changes to these model specifications cause inconsistent results. This paper highlights that, because results can vary greatly depending on the model, researchers and policymakers must be careful when drawing any conclusions from relationships between taxes and economic competitiveness.

The objective of this study is to investigate how country risk, different political actions from the government and bureaucratic behavior influence the activities in industry supply chains (SCs) in emerging markets. The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of these external stakeholders’ elements to the demand-side and supply-side drivers and barriers for improving competitiveness of Ready-Made Garment (RMG) industry in the way of analyzing supply chain. Considering the phenomenon of recent change in the RMG business environment and the competitiveness issues this study uses the principles of stakeholder and resource dependence theory and aims to find out some factors which influence to make an efficient supply chain for improving competitiveness. The RMG industry of Bangladesh is the case application of this study. Following a positivist paradigm, this study adopts a two phase sequential mixed-method research design consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. Qualitative field study is then carried out to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. A survey is carried out with sample of top and middle level executives of different garment companies of Dhaka city in Bangladesh and the collected quantitative data are analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling. The findings support eight hypotheses. From the analysis the external stakeholders’ elements like bureaucratic behavior and country risk have significant influence to the barriers. From the internal stakeholders’ point of view the manufacturers’ and buyers’ drivers have significant influence on the competitiveness. Therefore, stakeholders need to take proper action to reduce the barriers and increase the drivers, as the drivers have positive influence to improve competitiveness.

This study has both theoretical and practical contributions. This study represents an important contribution to the theory by integrating two theoretical perceptions to identify factors of the RMG industry’s SC that affect the competitiveness of the RMG industry. This research study contributes to the understanding of both external and internal stakeholders of national and international perspectives in the RMG (textile and clothing) business. It combines the insights of stakeholder and resource dependence theories along with the concept of the SC in improving effectiveness. In a practical sense, this study certainly contributes to the Bangladeshi RMG industry. In accordance with the desire of the RMG manufacturers, the research has shown that some influential constructs of the RMG industry’s SC affect the competitiveness of the RMG industry. The outcome of the study is useful for various stakeholders of the Bangladeshi RMG industry sector ranging from the government to various private organizations. The applications of this study are extendable through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

This paper aims to explore the construction of a valid and reliable measure for the competitiveness of cities that excludes the drivers of competitiveness from the index construction. Not incorporating these drivers in the index avoids the problem of assuming relative contributions (i.e. weights) of these drivers on competitiveness as a maintained hypothesis.

From the definition that competitiveness is the ability of a city to sustain prosperity, this study derives a model called the hedonic well-being index (HWI) in which prosperity is measured by using the consumption of goods and service including leisure. This study then uses secondary data sources to construct an exploratory HWI (assuming a Cobb Douglas functional form) and compare this index to three benchmarks, namely, income, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and the World Happiness Report (WHR) index. This study also review the component expenditure of the index across geographical locations.

The HWI is better predicted by the WHR index (a subjective well-being index) than by the GDP per capita (a measure of output), owing to the inclusion of leisure and household production absent in per capita GDP. This study explored and found regional variations in the distribution of the expenditure components in the HWI.

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of constructing an exploratory HWI to measure the competitiveness of cities using secondary data. The reliability of the index can be improved using primary data in future research. Separating the drivers from the definition of competitiveness allows testing of the contribution and interaction of these drivers on competitiveness.

Defining and measuring competitiveness has been a major focus in the business and competition literature over the past decades. The paper aims to use data-driven principal component analysis (PCA) to measure firm competitiveness.

A “3Ps” (performance, potential, and process) firm competitiveness indicator system is structured for indicator selection. Data-driven PCA is proposed to measure competitiveness by reducing the dimensionality of indicators and assigning weights according to the endogenous structure of a dataset. To illustrate and validate the method, a case study applying to Chinese international construction companies (CICCs) was conducted.

In the case study, 4 principal components were derived from 11 indicators through PCA. The principal components were labeled as “performance” and “capability” under the two respective super-components of “profitability” and “solvency” of a company. Weights of 11 indicators were then generated and competitiveness of CICCs was finally calculated by composite indexes.

This study offers a systematic indicator framework for firm competitiveness. The study also provides an alternative approach to better solve the problem of firm competitiveness measurement that has long plagued researchers.

The data-driven PCA approach alleviates the difficulties of dimensionality and subjectivity in measuring firm competitiveness and offers an alternative choice for companies and researchers to evaluate business success in future studies.

Competitiveness is the issue of the decade. Country competitiveness could have far reaching implications to the country's scale and scope of contribution to international trade, its ability to attract foreign direct (and indirect investment), its ability to gain access to international forums as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and last, but certainly not least, its ability to foster longer term economic growth. It is no surprise, therefore, that competitiveness performance is held central in national and international forums and that it is stated, compared and analysed over time and across borders. Two organizations have gone a long way towards measuring and recording competitive performance: The World Bank and the International Economic Forum. The World Bank began measuring competitiveness years ago. It did not produce a single measure, but a combination of measures that could lead to a judgement. The measures are elaborate and constitute a blend of the building blocks of the concept. The World Economic Forum has developed a unique series of measures that, taken together, should lead to a “competitiveness rank” or a sequencing of countries according to their competitive clout. Countries are subjected to an annual review of their composite parameters and ranked accordingly.

Competition is of interest to both policy makers and managers. However, existing studies concentrate on the measurement of national competitiveness while neglecting firm competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by developing a comprehensive and generic measurement model to understand firm competitiveness. The model is used to develop an award system to help companies in the self‐assessment of their competitiveness.

The theoretical base of the measurement of firm level competitiveness is driven from two national competitiveness models, namely World Competitive Yearbook and Global Competitiveness Index, while the assessment structure is based on the well‐known European Foundation for Quality Management Excellence Award. The competitiveness model developed in this paper is put into use in Turkey. The measures of the model are used for assessing the competitiveness of ten firms, in order to choose the most competitive firm of the year. The study in Turkey explains how the measurement model works by illustrating an example.

This paper attempts to develop a generic model in which the competition parameters do not change for individual companies. The model covers a wide variety of parameters that form the base of competition at the firm level. It is demonstrated that the competition model developed in the paper works in practice.

This paper contributes to the national competitiveness by providing deeper understanding of the dynamics of firm‐level competitiveness and provides some implications and suggestions for further studies.

The importance of container transportation has increased due to the globalization of the world economy. The purpose of this research is at proposing a framework to enhance the container terminals performance through evaluating efficiency and competitiveness.

The researchers used data envelopment analysis to assess the efficiency and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process to measure competitiveness of container terminals. The proposed framework captures key performance indicators to evaluate the container terminals' performance and identify areas that need improvement. It was applied to the Egyptian container terminals from the period of 2015–2019 as an empirical study.

Findings highlights the highest utilization of resources of Alexandria port while more attention should be given to the level of service provided. On the other hand, El-Sokhna should focus on more utilization of the available resources. The performance evaluation showed that the rest of Egyptian terminal ports should improve both competitiveness and efficiency at different levels based on their performance ranking.

The developed framework can be used as an evaluation tool to evaluate the performance of container terminals in other countries, and can be utilized as a performance benchmark tool to compare the performance of container terminals of competing ports.

The developed framework can help policymakers to assess efficiency and competitiveness based on both quantitative data and experts' judgement in order to help in formulating government logistics strategy.

The research provides a comprehensive framework to measure and evaluate competitiveness and efficiency of container terminals based on both quantitative data and experts' judgement.

This paper aims to explain the empirical relationship between competitiveness and economic growth in a globalizing world. In recent times, the advanced economies have experienced a slowdown of growth, whereas the BRICS countries continue to experience high growth. The authors explore the following question: Does competitiveness of nations’ degree of competition explains this differential in growth? The authors explore competiveness and growth in a macroeconomic perspective for the large economies in the OECD and BRICS countries.

The authors use dynamic panel data modelling technique to find the relationship between competitiveness and economic growth. This technique enables to control heterogeneity problem of this group to some extent. The focus variable of this study is annual GDP growth rate for the period 2007-2017. The proxies for measuring competitiveness in this paper are trade as percentage of GDP, product market regulation, unit labour cost and global competitive index. Innovation prevalence of foreign ownership, efficiency, competition, state of cluster development, venture capital availability, extent of market, research and development expenditure as percentage of the GDP mergers and acquisitions and multifactor productivity are the control variables.

The authors find that the degree of competitiveness competition is less likely to impact economic growth in the OECD countries because they have more or less similar competitive environment. Innovation, extent of market and state of cluster development and venture capital availability explaining growth differential. Increased competition is likely to affect growth negatively. This explains the oligopolistic structures of the world economy. However, the BRICS countries vary significantly in competitive environment. This is the reason of volatility in their growth. The conclusion is that competitiveness is important for sustained growth. Competitiveness is, however, an outcome of a set of policies, not a policy itself.

Productivity data for OECD and BRICS countries are not available. Various series are not comparable. OECD countries have discontinued yearly unit labour cost series, and high frequency series are available but no such series for BRICS exists.

First, this paper proposes that wage growth, measured by the unit labour cost growth rate, is an important determinant of competitiveness amongst the nations. Wage growth is falling short of productivity growth in the OECD countries. This has implications for the long run sustainability of growth, skill development and inequalities in the region. Since 2011, world economic recovery is slow. Wage growth is imperative for generating sufficient private demand in the OECD countries. Second, this paper provides evidence that competitiveness is important for explaining growth in the OECD and the BRICS countries. However, it also highlights that competitiveness can be measured effectively by the trade differential or with the help of unit labour cost. Unaligned real effective exchange rate in terms of unit labour costs is the real cause of the problem.

Research in this area is still in infancy. This research finds that how competitiveness affects growth. A more competitive nation can sell more, but not necessarily grow rapidly. In development process, growth comes first, and at the latter stages, countries have to introduce effective reforms for competitiveness. This is the effect of competitiveness on growth by comparing various indexes.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a thorough empirical investigation of the potential link between corporate innovations and corporate competitiveness in the context of the UK IT industry.

This research uses a panel of 216 UK IT firms for the period from 2000 to 2016. The sample data for this study were extracted from the Worldscope, extracted from the Datastream database from Thomson Reuters. For the analysis of the data, the generalised method of moments model is applied.

The results of this study provide empirical evidence that there exists a strong, positive link between corporate innovations and corporate competitiveness. Such evidence further reinforces the common view in the current literature of strategic management that because of the nature of their business, firms in the IT industry need to enhance their innovative capacities on a continual basis because of their critical role on these firms’ success and survival. Also, it is found that when the proxies for corporate innovations are lagged by two periods, their impact on corporate competitiveness becomes relatively more significant. However, when they are further lagged, i.e. by three periods, such an impact turns out to be relatively less pronounced.

The data gathered for this paper was restricted to IT-oriented firms in the UK. Using a secondary database (Datastream), the paper considered the period of 2000-2016.

The research makes a significant contribution to the current debate on the relationship between information technology, innovation and performance, referred to in the literature as the productivity paradox, by studying the problem in the IT industry. It supports organisations from the sector in their efforts to deal with the dynamic nature of technological innovations and of the context where they operate. Methodologically, the way the study has measured the concepts of innovation and performance and the lessons learned from their analysis has also brought value to the research.