ABSTRACT
Over the past three decades, economic globalisation has been associated with a growing emphasis on issues of international competitiveness around the world. In 1979 the World Economic Forum published its first Global Competitiveness Report and during the 1980s several developed country governments created commissions and published reports on competitiveness. 1 This trend intensified in the 1990s with reports by the US Department of Commerce, the UK Cabinet Office, the UK Department of Trade and Industry and the European Commission (Lall, 2001a: fn2).
