An Overview and Analysis on Indices of Regional Competitiveness

Over the last years many policy-makers and analysts have put effort on measuring and comparing regional competitive performance. This goes back to the fact that the concept of competitiveness was taken over from the business field and applied on the national and regional level. And as competitiveness is a relative concept, it implies the need to compare with others such that regions are inexorably sucked into the continual monitoring and periodic benchmarking of what ?the competition¡® is doing and where the ?best practice¡® or ?best offer¡® lies. Therefore, efforts have increasingly focused on the development of composite indices which combine relevant indicators into one overarching measure, the results of which can be reported in the form of a ?league table¡®. Such indices and rankings attract widespread attention in the media and could be regarded as a potentially useful 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. This paper gives an overview on some of the indices to be found in the world, analyzing them with respect to indicators included and predictive quality. We conclude with some reflections on the value and role of measures of regional competitiveness.