ABSTRACT
As the previous chapter indicated, the predilection for benchmarking and the spread of the competitiveness obsession have created a voracious demand for indicators by which policy makers and analysts can measure and compare regional competitive performance. Quite simply, there is a desire to see which regions are ‘competitive’, or ‘winning’ the competitiveness game. This raises all sorts of questions around what it means for a region to be competitive and how this can be measured. Efforts have increasingly focused on the development of composite indices which bundle together into one overarching measure all those indicators deemed to be relevant to competitiveness. These have the clear advantage of presenting results which can be ranked and thus reported in the form of a ‘league table’ – thus providing avery visual means of portraying regions as competitive entities, competing with one another for the prize of competitive success. These are growing in popularity, and indeed a plethora of city and regional indices are now in evidence around the world on the basis of a range of different measures of competitiveness. Perhaps not surprisingly, such indices and rankings attract widespread attention in the media and are increasingly used and indeed funded by governments as part of their general analysis of the performance of regional economies and their key institutions. However, significant questions surround the validity and usefulness of these
indices and rankings and what they actually tell us about regions, their competitive performance or success and what this ‘success’ actually means – questions which to date have received only limited critical interrogation. Some of these questions relate to the practical task of whether and how
regional competitiveness itself can be measured. The chaotic and fuzzy nature of the competitiveness concept and the theory underlying it suggests that this is unlikely to be a straightforward or easy task, with critical questions, among others, concerning what variables should be included in the indices and for what ‘regions’, and how (if at all) these indicators should be weighted and aggregated to produce an overall index. Beyond this, even if regional competitiveness were to be properly measur-
able, it is debatable what any measures of regional competitiveness actually
tell us that is meaningful. There are, for instance, considerable questions around the potential utility of these indicators as a means of helping firms, policy makers and institutions to assess the performance of their economies in comparable (i.e. numerical) terms, and to undertake appropriate remedial strategies in response. In a similar vein, there are questions as to whether league tables – which, by design, imply directly comparable performance between fixed or known entities competing directly in the same contest for the same prize – are indeed meaningful for the complex, putative open and multifaceted entities that constitute ‘regions’ (see Introduction). More fundamentally, there are considerable questions around what these indicators and league tables reveal that is meaningful about a region’s ‘success’, who benefits from them, and what this means more broadly for the quality of life and wellbeing of those living and working in regions. To put it starkly, what is this ‘competitiveness’ for? These are some of the principal questions to be explored in this chapter,
which now proceeds as follows. It begins by examining the growth in the number and range of indices of regional competitiveness, with a view to understanding their function and appeal. It then draws on some of the most frequently reported composite indices of regional competitiveness to explore in more detail how they are typically constructed, the conceptualizations of competitiveness on which they are based, and their utility for policy makers and analysts. It then proceeds to provide a critique of the adequacy of competitiveness indices in providing meaningful information about regional ‘success’ and development when these terms are conceived of more broadly.
