Did (Or Does) the United States Have a Competitiveness Crisis?

Abstract

Much policymaking in the 1980s at the federal, state, and local levels tried to redress the U.S. competitiveness crisis. A guiding presumption was that there was a sudden and profound inability of the United States to compete in manufactured goods. However, there has been little systematic analysis of American competitive performance disaggregated for the entire manufacturing sector. Data analyzed here for the years 1970–1990 and for the 24 major two‐and three‐digit ISIC industries reveals that there was a competitiveness crisis in the 1980s, but it was not endemic to all industries. Market share, trade balance, and revealed comparative advantage indicators suggest the crisis was characterized by intensified competitive decline for the auto, textiles, and electronics, industries, and by competitive reversals for the electrical machinery and office and computing machine industries. While many other major American industries appear to be in competitive health, the cumulative effect of macroeconomic imbalances is likely to cause future competitive stress in the capital goods and high‐technology sectors.

Tourism and Hotel Competitiveness Research

“…In other words, it is the quality of a competitor that determines its probability of winning the competition, which indicates that the competition has to be specified along with the competitiveness. Papadakis (1994) described the same notion from a consumer's perspective, suggesting that competitiveness is reflected by the consumer choice between two or more goods competing for the consumer's dollar.…”

“…The firm-level competitiveness generally refers to the ability of the firm to increase in size, expand its global market share, and its profit. According to Papadakis (1994), a nation's competitiveness can be measured by the accumulation of the competitiveness of firms operating within its boundaries; furthermore, the strength of these firms is considered to be the single most important criterion of national competitiveness.…”

Destination competitiveness from a tourist perspective: A case of the United Arab Emirates

“…However, because it is firms, not nations, which compete in international markets (Porter, ; Porter, ) and domestic markets (Clark & Guy, ), thus, from a microperspective, competitiveness refers to the firm‐level phenomenon (Omerzel, ) such as the ability of the firm to increase in size, expand its global market share and its profit (Clark & Guy, ), and create value that is beneficial to the end customer and difficult for others to copy (Dwyer & Kim, ). The competitiveness of firms determines national competitiveness (Papadakis, ). Competitiveness is about “how nations and enterprises manage the totality of their competencies to achieve prosperity or profit” (International Institute for Management Development, ).…”

“…Some scholars believe that competitiveness refers to productivity, efficiency, and profitability (Tefertiller & Ward, ) as a means of achieving high standards of living and increasing social welfare (Huggins, ) and the importance of the socio‐economic environment in which the firms are operating (Blaine, ). Others refer to everything from national government policies and citizens' attitudes to investments in infrastructure and manufacturing capability (Newman, Porter, Roessner, Kongthong, & Jin, ), producing more and better quality goods and services that are superior to those provided by competitors (D'Cruz & Rugman, ), the price and nonprice factors (D'Cruz & Rugman, ), rising rate of returns (Scott & Lodge, ), consumer choice (Papadakis, ), and transformation of assets to economic benefits through sales to customers (Department of Industry, Science and Resources, ).…”

National Competitiveness: A Question of Cost Conditions or Institutional Circumstances?

“…Although stridently criticized by economists and management scholars alike for being simplistic and erroneous (Davies and Ellis, 2000;Grant, 1991;Krugman 1994Krugman , 1996, the notion of countries competing with each other much as firms do for markets has, unsurprisingly, proven popular with politicians, who have been lent limited support by the populist work of some business academics (Thurow, 1992;Tyson 1992). Politicians' 'dangerous obsession', to borrow Krugman's words (1994), with national competitiveness so conceived spawned a vehement debate in the 1990s among scholars that has now effectively dismissed any notion of national competitiveness being directly similar to the competitiveness of firms or whole industry sectors (Boltho, 1996;Burton, 1994;Johnston and Chinn, 1996;Papadakis, 1994Papadakis, , 1996Preeg, 1994;Strange, 1998). Nevertheless, the debate did not dismiss, and indeed perhaps served to highlight, the importance to national competitiveness of what Porter has later termed in the Global Competitiveness Report the 'micro-economic' business environment, comprising partly the way in which firms compete with each other, but mostly micropublic policy factors forming the institutional framework within which such competition takes place (WEF, various years).…”