New Criticism on the Competitiveness Concept: A Critical Review of the Concept at the Macroeconomic Level
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Competitiveness of nations has always been a subject of controversy regarding its validity. It is a concept surrounded by paradox, and it is widely used despite its conceptual fragility and the lack of a definition consensus. Moreover, this omnipresent concept in economic analysis is not included in any economic theory in the strict sense. Up to now, there is no theory of national competitiveness. Despite the abundant publications about competitiveness, a critical review of competitiveness of nation has not yet appeared. This paper is proposed as a critical review of the concept of competitiveness at the nation’s level, and it aims to examine the reasons that make this concept a point of controversy among economists. This paper summarizes the rejection of the competitiveness concept in three points: Firstly, competitiveness is a microeconomic concept which gets deteriorated when applied to a nation, because nations do not compete like companies. Secondly, competitiveness is gained reputation in the political world; it is used without attention to explain success or defeat of an economy in a simplistic way. Today, the concept of national competitiveness is part of a hegemonic discourse. Finally, neither a definition consensus, nor an empirical evidence or a theoretical foundations, the national competitiveness appears such an international ideology rather than an economic concept. This doctrine is more evident with economic patriotism and the globalization that raises the frenzy of competition (Krugman, 1999).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".