A Bibliometric Analysis of International Competitiveness (1983–2017)

María De Las Mercedes Capobianco-Uriarte,María Del Pilar Casado-Belmonte,Gema María Marín-Carrillo,Eduardo Terán-Yépez

doi:10.3390/su11071877

María De Las Mercedes Capobianco-Uriarte, María Del Pilar Casado-Belmonte + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su11071877

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Mar 28, 2019
Citations: 50	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Almería

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to determine the current state of scientific production regarding “competitiveness” in the international context through a bibliometric analysis. This study presents a review of 2293 documents published about competitiveness in the international context from the Scopus database (1983–2017). Two different processing software applications were used, Vosviewer and Scimat. Although very recent bibliometric analyses of the topic exist, the methodology applied in the search term is restricted due to the separate use of a single search combination “national competitiveness” or “international competitiveness”. For this work, three combinations of words with logical operators were used, TITLE-ABS-KEY (“international competitiveness”) OR (“national competitiveness”) OR (“export competitiveness”), thus managing to span the concept of competitiveness in the international context in a broader sense. Our results show that competitive research is in a period of high production. The most productive authors and journals are not the most cited on competitiveness. Only three countries stand out with the largest scientific production about this topic. The trend of the most recent research points to knowledge areas in environmental sciences. The most researched geographical areas in international competitiveness encompass the whole world and especially Southeast Asia.

Highlights

In a globalized world, there is growing concern about economic growth, and more often the concept of competitiveness is used to analyze economic development
In the conclusions of the report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on competitiveness in the agricultural and food sectors, it is indicated that: “Competitiveness can be defined as the ability to face competition and to be successful when facing competition
The second most cited article (336) is a paper by Fagerberg [4], this paper develops and tests a model of differing trends in international competitiveness and economic growth across countries

Summary

Introduction

There is growing concern about economic growth, and more often the concept of competitiveness is used to analyze economic development. Competitiveness is generally measured by the shares which a country attains in its markets, due allowance being made for its size and stage of development. Competitiveness in this very general sense comes to being synonymous with overall performance”. Other authors included the role of government function in their description of the term competitiveness [4,5,6] It is not until the definition given by European Commission in [7] that the sustainable basis is incorporated in the definition. The contribution to the concept on the part of the World Competitiveness Center is noteworthy [11], stating that the concept is the “ability of a nation to create and maintain an environment that sustains more value creation for its enterprises and more prosperity for its people; or to put it shortly, competitiveness refers to the way in which a country manages the totality of its resources and competencies to increase the prosperity of its people”

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