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The world order is changing, with the lead of the US waning, along with its reduced commitment to rule-based multilateralism during the past administration. China is on the way to becoming number one again, investing abroad with primarily egoistic motives and steered by an authoritarian domestic regime. Meanwhile, the EU is striving for a new geopolitical role, while becoming more heterogenous.

The paper measures performance and competitiveness not only according to conventional criteria but also based on broader welfare indicators. The ultimate aim of competitiveness is to deliver well-being. Decentralized local strategies are presented, but also the need for guidance by societal goals.

What we measure matters. The EU is underperforming in per capita GDP and failing to close the gap in labour productivity towards the frontier defined by the USA. But it is leading in environmental and social indicators, has an accessible health system and provides increasing longevity. This performance nevertheless has to be improved, if climate goals should be fulfilled and upcoming new inequalities addressed.

Localization and place-based strategies have advantages, but also harper the danger that negative spillovers may not be minimized and positive not used. Innovation is a search process but has to be directed by goals in Europe and globally. Otherwise, change incurs high costs and many losers, fostering nationalism and populistic calls to return to a past glory that never existed.

This paper aims to show how the term competitiveness has been applied and adapted since Michael Porter made it respectable in economics, strategic management and consulting. This paper connects the concept with new developments in the theory of the firm, theories of growth and, finally, with Beyond GDP literature.

This paper distinguishes between input and output competitiveness, developing a set of indictors for both. Countries are ranked according to costs, structure and capabilities (drivers of competitiveness) as well as according to economic, social and ecological performance (performance pillars). Finally, outcome competitiveness is explained by the individual drivers, using econometrics and principal component analyses.

Defining competitiveness as the ability of a country or nation to deliver Beyond GDP goals changes the policy conclusions drawn from the quest for competitiveness. Policies to reduce costs prove inferior relative to “high-road strategies” built on skills, innovation and supporting institutions. Ecological ambition and social investment are not costs, but enablers of competitiveness for high-income countries.

Connecting the well-known term competitiveness with Beyond GDP goals is a new approach. It is very different from the old concept of cost competitiveness criticized heavily by Paul Krugman. Supplying a set of indicators to measure “low-road” and “high-road” competitiveness leads to important new policy conclusions.

Aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

The issue of labor markets is a very hot political issue as Europe heads towards the end of the first decade of the 21st Century – but it is in the area of immigration, rather than competition. The rights and wrongs of how many immigrants are allowed into a given country exercise the media in particular, splitting opinion down traditional political lines of left and right, yet the economists who argue between regulation and deregulation of this issue are largely ignored in the melee.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

The purpose of this paper is to reassess the relative impact of labour market regulation on economic performance. Inflexible labour markets combined with high welfare costs are often thought to be the main cause of low growth in Europe.

This paper compares the impact of labour market regulation to that of macroeconomic policies (such as fiscal policy, monetary policy, macroeconomic cost management) and to that of investment into future growth (such as research, education and the diffusion of technology). We develop for this purpose a highly stylised model explaining economic growth; we suggest a synthetic measure of performance and use data for the US and Europe for the empirical test.

The main result is that regulation impacts on growth, the impact of regulatory change is, however, less easy to demonstrate. The impact of macro economic policy can be demonstrated first by the more growth oriented monetary and fiscal policy in the US and the success of some European countries in bringing private and public costs in line with productivity and tax revenues. However, boosting investment into future growth by encouraging research, education and technology diffusion seems to be the most important determinant of performance.

As to the limits of this paper, we have to acknowledge that our analysis refers to a short time period, a small number of countries and uses a highly stylised model.

If the results can be replicated for larger data sets and by more elaborated technical methods, the findings have an important policy implication: country strategies relying only on deregulation, without complementary macroeconomic policy and without strategy to boost “growth drivers” are suboptimal. This questions the policy advice given by some economists and economic think tanks, which call for deregulation as main policy strategy and then expect market forces to boost growth quickly and without specific policy measures.

The attempt to assess the relative impact of the three policy areas is specific to this paper; most other papers focus on one policy area only.

This paper aims to apply a multidimensional approach to assessing the financial well-being of European countries.

Financial well-being is a very complex phenomenon to measure because it is composed of different dimensions. Therefore, this paper uses a multidimensional and fuzzy methodology to assess financial well-being in Europe. The financial well-being fuzzy indicator was calculated using European Quality of Life Survey data.

Financial well-being is heterogeneous across European countries. This evidence is confirmed both at the level of overall financial well-being and at the level of sub-indices. The degree of financial well-being is not directly related to wealth as traditionally measured (i.e. GDP), but shows some correspondence with socio-economic characteristics of the population and with governance and cultural elements of a country.

Understanding financial well-being could help financial institutions to transition from a one-size-fits-all approach to a more tailored approach when they provide financial services and could help policy makers to consider financial well-being when they decide how and where to allocate public spending.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to employ a fuzzy methodology for the analysis of financial well-being in Europe.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the conceptual adequacy of the learning economy and its ability to describe the modern globalised economy. It is argued that unlike many fleeting catchwords and phrases found in economics, the learning economy represents a superior conceptual and heuristic starting point that reflects a new and emerging economic regime.

The paper examines those features of the learning economy which makes it a useful conceptualization and highlights some preconditions that are functional for its emergence. The paper then assesses the empirical validity of the learning economy and gauges its performance across 16 EU countries.

The learning economy represents a viable and useful concept in economics and the broader social sciences, which synthesizes recent attempts to depict what is new in the world economy into an internally coherent whole while overcoming previous shortcomings. It reflects a tangible reality that has taken hold most firmly in a small but significant part of the world, the Nordic countries of Northwestern Europe.

Because it has already emerged in some advanced countries, the learning economy offers a concrete exemplar for other countries to emulate. If one has to ask people and communities to sacrifice, save and invest for the future, it is more convincing to do so for a concrete and credible future that does exist than for some conjectural future.

The paper uses an epistemological perspective to analyse the concept of the learning economy as articulated by Bengt-Äke Lundvall.

The aim of the paper is to investigate some dynamic aspects of the smooth adjustment hypothesis (SAH) associated with intra‐industry trade (IIT). The structure of trade expansion in Hungary and Poland over the period 1990‐1998 and its implications for labour market adjustment is examined.

The paper applies an econometric approach and considers three‐digit International Standard Industry Classification classified data. The paper uses a model developed by recent empirical literature, both in static and dynamic forms and tests whether the results are sensitive for the choice of length of period and marginal intra‐industry indices.

The econometric analysis suggests that changes in domestic consumption and productivity have significant influence on employment changes. Significant and negative relationships were found between trade openness and employment changes. The calculations provide some evidence to support SAH, especially for Poland. However, the effects of IIT on employment changes are small especially to additional hypotheses. The estimations show that partial trade liberalisation in Hungary and Poland has led to lower adjustment costs.

The paper is one of the first to focus on labour market adjustment costs in transition countries. Its results also reveal that the estimations on the impacts of trade liberalisations should be interpreted only with care due to sensitivity on the length of time period and applied econometric techniques.