ABSTRACT
AIM AND STRUCTURE OF THE CHAPTER This chapter investigates the concept ‘the competitiveness of a nation’. This term is often used in politics, as well as in popular and even scientific research. However, economists are far from being able to supply a unified and commonly accepted definition. Here we propose a definition, which explicitly relates competitiveness to performance and to the democratically defined aspiration level of an economy. We compare the proposed definition to other concepts. We describe the case study of Austria’s post-war development, as an economy which gradually recaptured competitiveness, following a period of hopeless uncompetitiveness during the post-war years. And finally, we apply the proposed concept in the assessment of competitiveness in the USA, Japan, the EU and Switzerland. This evaluation can be neither a thorough nor a comprehensive evaluation, but should demonstrate the usefulness of the specific concept.
