ABSTRACT
Although it may have had some earlier predecessors (see Reinert 1995), the term ‘competitiveness’ is really only a recent one. It entered general economic parlance in the mid 1980s, mainly through the writings of business school gurus, especially Michael Porter. But since then it has become a prominent, even hegemonic, discourse amongst policymakers the world over. Economists and experts everywhere have elevated ‘competitiveness’ to the status of a ‘natural law’ of the modern capitalist economy, and assessing a country’s competitiveness and devising policies to enhance it have rapidly become officially institutionalised tasks.
