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Regional competitiveness refers to the capacity of a region to manage its resources and competencies to increase the well-being of its people. Measuring regional competitiveness is, thus, a major consideration for policymakers, businesses and the academic community in their endeavour to improve the same. This paper aims to demonstrate a novel way to calculate the regional competitiveness index under a two-stage objective general index (OGI) framework.

The authors compute the regional competitiveness index under a two-stage OGI framework. In the first stage, they aggregate the sub-factor level information into a factor level index; in the second stage, they use the factor level index to obtain a regional competitiveness index.

The authors discuss the properties of the proposed index in detail. They further analyse five periods of regional competitiveness of Peru spanning the period 2008-2015. Among others, the results reveal the existence of the resource curse of the mining regions of Peru.

The paper is a contribution to the practical measurement of competitiveness.

The calculation of a regional competitiveness index is vital for improving the competitiveness of the countries and for reducing regional inequalities.

When compared to the existent methods available in the literature, the advantage of the proposed method resides in the fact that the derived index has a positive correlation with the factor-level indices and the factor-level indices have a positive correlation with the sub-factor-level information.

The dynamic response of the nuclear power plants (NPPs) with pile foundation reinforcement have not yet been systemically investigated in detail. Thus, there is an urgent need to improve evaluation methods for nonlithological foundation reinforcements, as this issue is bound to become an unavoidable task.

A nonlinear seismic wave input method is adopted to consider both a nonlinear viscoelastic artificial boundary and the nonlinear properties of the overburden layer soil. Subsequently, the effects of certain vital parameters on the structural response are analyzed.

A suitable range for the size of the overburden foundation is suggested. Then, when piles are used to reinforce the overburden foundation, the peak frequencies in the floor response spectra (FRS) in the horizontal direction becomes higher (38%). Finally, the Poisson ratio of the foundation soil has a significant influence on the FRS peak frequency in the vertical direction (reduce 35%–48%).

The quantifiable results are performed to demonstrate the seismic responses with respect to key design parameters, including foundational dimensions, the Poisson Ratio of the soil and the depth of the foundation. The results can help guide the development of seismic safety requirements for NPPs.