Including the Competitiveness Objectives into the National Socio-economic Framework

Research on national competitiveness issue still lacks a coherent, comprehensive and universally accepted conceptual and methodological basis. Second, national competitiveness is commonly set as isolated public policy goals, with little preoccupation with its systematic relationships to and convergence with the other socio-economic objectives. The present article proposes a socio-economic conceptual framework for linking them. In the first part of it I present a succint history of the most important international trade and competitiveness theories and then analyze both the meaning of national competitiveness and the factors that influence it. In the second part, starting from the implications of Karl Aiginger’s holistic approach to national competitiveness, I show that ensuring national competitiveness is a necessary but not sufficient pre-condition of achieving both short-term welfare and long-term development objectives. In the final section, I sketch a socio-economic framework which can facilitate the further integration of short-term priorities and long-term national objectives.