ABSTRACT
This book has argued that locational competition has shifted to the international stage, with regions being key geographical units for understanding changing patterns of global economic development. The notion of regional competitiveness is a means of understanding differences in rates of economic development across regions, as well as their future economic growth prospects. Initiatives such as the World Competitiveness Index of Regions (WCIR) seek to provide a more spatially nuanced understanding of global competitiveness than national measures of international competitiveness, with regional competitiveness focused explicitly on the microeconomic determinants of regional development and growth. Economic development, especially at the regional level, remains a relatively fuzzy concept with no standard or accepted means of conceptualizing or measuring it. The concept of regional competitiveness provides a means for both conceptualization and measurement based on the understood key levers and drivers of growth within a twenty-first-century global economy.
