Competitive Industrial Performance Research Articles

A sustainable study of competitive industrial performance amidst environmental quality: New insight from novel Fourier Perspective

This paper uses the novel Fourier Augmented Autoregressive Distributed Lag within the load capacity curve framework to investigate the effects of economic growth, trade openness, renewable energy consumption, and competitive industrial performance on environmental sustainability. The results of the empirical analysis provide evidence that the load capacity curve is valid in Turkiye. Moreover, while trade openness jeopardizes environmental sustainability, renewable energy consumption and industrial competitiveness increase environmental quality. Policymakers should focus intensively on policies that can achieve SDG 9 and industrialization activities. It is essential to give privileges, especially to companies operating in the industrial sector, regarding the transition to renewable energy. Energy efficiency policies that will accelerate the transition to clean energy sources are also an alternative to escape from fossil energy immediately. Environmental factors should be considered when importing intermediate goods used in industry, and these policies should be guaranteed by law as soon as possible.

Asymmetric relationship between competitive industrial performance, renewable energy, industrialization, and carbon footprint: Does artificial intelligence matter for environmental sustainability?

Developing nations have emerged as integral contributors to the global economy since the beginning of the 21st century. Their swift economic expansion and associated activities lead to a rise in carbon footprint. Keeping this in view, unlike previous studies, this study unfolds the asymmetric repercussions of competitive industrial performance and renewable energy within the context of the industrialization era in seven Asian developing countries from 1990 to 2020. The panel NARDL and asymmetric panel causality methodologies have been applied for the purpose of nonlinear analysis. According to the results, the advantageous influence of competitive industrial performance is considerably more pronounced than that of industrialization. The coefficient magnitude associated with the negative shock demonstrates a significantly substantial value in comparison to the positive shock concerning the influence of competitive industrial performance on carbon footprint. Both positive and negative changes in competitive industrial performance mitigate carbon footprint. Renewable energy generates favorable consequences by promoting environmental quality via a reduction in carbon footprint. Across various emerging economies in Asia, the rapid rise of industrialization is linked to the deterioration of environmental quality. Finally, artificial intelligence and natural resource rents decrease carbon footprints while information and communication technology intensifies environmental concerns. The research emphasizes the critical nature of integrating artificial intelligence, robotics, and technological industrial competitiveness in order to adequately tackle the carbon footprint in Asian developing countries.

Evaluating a pathway for environmental sustainability: The role of competitive industrial performance and renewable energy consumption in European countries

AbstractWith the efforts of the United Nations, environmental sustainability is becoming the subject of countries. Policymakers and researchers closely follow the environmental dimensions of Sustainable Development Goals. This study offers a new perspective for the European Union economies by directly targeting SDG 9 and considers environmental sustainability policies in selecting variables. To be more precise, this study probes the effects of economic growth, trade openness, renewable energy, human capital, and competitive industrial performance on the load capacity factor for EU countries over the period of 1995–2018. This study uses the CUP‐FM and CUP‐BC approaches due to cross‐sectional dependence and heterogeneity. In addition, the study does not ignore possible structural breaks. As a result of the empirical analysis, while economic growth, trade openness, and competitiveness worsen environmental quality, renewable energy and human capital contribute to environmental sustainability. Based on the panel data results, EU economies still rely on fossil fuels to maintain competitiveness in the industry. The EU, which has 2030 and 2050 targets, can eliminate the disadvantages of competitiveness by expanding the environmental quality‐enhancing feature of renewable energy and human capital. Moreover, this study provides SDG‐oriented policy recommendations for EU countries.

Assessing the connection between competitive industrial performance on load capacity factor within the LCC framework: Implications for sustainable policy in BRICS economies.

Industrialization plays a crucial role in socio-economic development as it holds significant potential for creating new jobs, tightening the income gap, and promoting the use of advanced technology. As global competition intensifies, emerging economies emulate industrialized economies in accelerating manufacturing activity to improve national welfare and join the new global order. However, policymakers' understanding of how competitiveness in the industrial sector helps developing countries accomplish their sustainable development goals must be deepened. This paper aims to analyze the connections among competitive industrial performance, renewable energy consumption, urbanization, and load capacity factor (LCF) in the BRICS economies for the period between 1990 and 2018. Robust evidence from the continuously updated fully modified (CUP-FM) and continuously updated bias-corrected (CUP-BC) models shows that greater industrial competitiveness enhances environmental quality. The findings also reveal that income growth ultimately evolves as an ecologically friendly factor, confirming the validity of the load capacity curve (LCC) hypothesis. Another outcome of the econometric analysis indicates that renewable energy consumption contributes to the LCF, whereas urbanization damages the environment. Therefore, BRICS policymakers should concentrate on maintaining their competitiveness, implementing resilient urban planning, and promoting the usage of renewable energy to safeguard the environment while simultaneously achieving rapid economic growth.

A new look at China’s environmental quality: how does environmental sustainability respond to the asymmetrical behavior of the competitive industrial sector?

ABSTRACT This research aims to expand the existing literature by bringing a new perspective to China’s environmental quality. Existing literature concerning China’s environmental sustainability disregards competitive industrial performance, which allows the analysis of Sustainable Development Goal-9. The study investigates the impact of competitive industrial performance, economic growth, and renewable energy consumption on the environmental quality (represented by load capacity factor) within the load capacity curve framework. Considering the positive and negative shocks in industrial competitiveness, the study runs the novel asymmetric ARDL with Fourier terms method to examine the non-linear connection between competitiveness and the environment. Empirical analysis shows that industrial competitiveness asymmetrically affects environmental quality and that the load capacity curve hypothesis is invalid in China. It is also evident that renewable energy contributes to environmental quality. Based on these findings, the study presents sustainable development policies for China within the framework of SDG targets. In this context, country’s rapid growth and higher-order industrial competitiveness strategies need to be redesigned in order to increase the share of high-tech activities in total manufacturing and the portion of renewable energy in total energy use. Accordingly, the Chinese policymakers’ primary objectives should be regulations that guide fundamental principles for enhancing environmental quality while preserving the country’s rapid growth and competitive advantage in the industrial process.

A path towards green revolution: How do competitive industrial performance and renewable energy consumption influence environmental quality indicators?

This paper probes the effectiveness of competitive industrial performance (CIP) and renewable energy in enhancing load capacity factor in top-10 CIP economies for the period 1990–2018. We run panel econometric techniques that address cross-sectional dependence, endogeneity and heterogeneity to provide policy recommendations with the applications of industry, innovation, and infrastructure (SDG 9), which is linked to affordable and clean energy (SDG 7) and climate action (SDG 13). In the empirical analysis, two different environmental quality indicators such as CO2 emissions and load capacity factor are used. While cointegration between variables cannot be detected in the emissions model, evidence for the existence of cointegration is presented in the load capacity factor model. The findings in the paper suggest that economic growth and competitive industrial performance adversely impact environmental quality, while renewable energy consumption and human capital can improve load capacity factor. The result shows that human capital and renewable energy consumption can be strong tools for stimulating load capacity factor in top-10 CIP economies. Countries with high competitive industrial performance need to return to a green economy without losing their competitiveness.

Global Inclusive and Sustainable Competitive Industrial Performance (ISCIP): An efficiency based spatio-temporal analysis for 139 countries

The most recent debate championed by World Economic Forum suggests that competitiveness, social cohesion and environmental sustainability may be compatible. This gives hope to policymakers that a productive, low-carbon, and inclusive economy is possible and perhaps the only viable option going forward. In the context of industrial development, a diagnostics and monitoring tool that can benchmark a country’s industrial competitiveness within the broader framework of the post-2030 agenda is therefore highly sought by policymakers. The original contribution of the present study is to expand the scope of United Nations Industrial Development Organization’s Competitiveness Industrial Performance Index by proposing the Inclusive and Sustainable Competitive Industrial Performance Index which (i) considers a new set of social and environmental dimensions in addition to the industrial competitiveness; (ii) provides the flexibility of a dual-formulation of manufacturing-specific and whole-economy scenarios to reflect different policy needs of countries; (iii) applies a cross-efficiency Data Envelopment Analysis model and a spatio-temporal analysis to optimize the composition of Inclusive and Sustainable Competitive Industrial Performance Index indicators for 139 countries (2010–2019). With a different method of aggregation and new dimensions being taken into account, results concerning the Competitive Industrial Performance Index and the Inclusive and Sustainable Competitive Industrial Performance Index country rankings are aligned in flagging that industrial competitive and high-income countries are more effective than their peers in promoting industrial development by minimizing tradeoffs with social and environmental indicators. A limitation of the present study is that results do not reflect the global shocks affecting world megatrends after 2019. Second, as the Inclusive and Sustainable Competitive Industrial Index remains a composite indicator, a high rank can still hide significant negative externalities in absolute terms. Finally, the set of the composing ISCIP sub – indicators cannot be exhaustive to capture all the aspects of sustainability.

Testing the validity of the pollution haven hypothesis for regionally leading emerging economies

This study tests the validity of the Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH) for the case of six emerging industrial economies with a relatively higher competitive industrial performance compared to the other developing countries in their region. The sampled countries are China (East Asia), Poland (Europe), Mexico (Latin America), India (South Asia), South Africa (Africa), and Turkey (Europe and the Middle East). The study adopts a Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) approach to the Pollution-Intensive Industrial Products (PIIPs) and differs from many relevant studies by grouping PIIPs and distinguishing a wide range set of factors between those that directly affect the RCA in PIIPs and those that have indirect effects through attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Estimations of random-effects models over the period 1995-2018 provide weak support for the validity of PHH: Despite inward FDI stocks are positively associated with the RCA indices of higher polluting industries, the environmental policy elasticity of inward FDI stocks is slight and insignificant. The study argues that the evidence of the PHH may change over proxies, measurements, model construction, and (more importantly) the classification of PIIPs that should be considered by future studies while analyzing the PHH.

Analyzing manufacturing sector and selected development challenges: A panel data analysis

The importance of manufacturing as a main determinant of economic growth has been explored extensively in the literature considering manufacturing as the engine of economic growth. In our study, a new database covering 117 countries for 1995–2017 containing four indicators, namely manufacturing value added share in GDP, growth of GDP, manufacturing energy intensity, and UNIDO's Competitive Industrial Performance score is constructed. Relying on this dataset and the Granger causality tests the paper investigates the effect of economic growth, energy intensity and the competitiveness index on manufacturing value added. Applying adequate econometric methods the effect of this set of variables on the relative importance of manufacturing in the economy as a whole measured by the share of MVA in GDP (MVAsh) is analyzed. An inverted U shape is verified with different turning points between static and dynamic analyses in the full sample, as well as in industrialized countries and emerging and developing countries separately, with turning points all within samples. Energy intensity has negative effect in most of the cases while CIP has positive effect with high magnitudes. The rate of adjustment is high.

GREENING OF THE MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY IN THE EURASIAN ECONOMIC UNION

The main purpose of this research is to reveal the current state of the manufacturing industry in the EAEU countries in terms of environmentally sustainable development. Based on UNIDO’s experts - Jaime Moll de Alba and Valentin Todorov’s methodology of a composite green industrial performance index (GIP), we rank and analyse the industrial performance of the EAEU countries. Finally, we use correlation analysis to compare the GIP scores with UNIDO’s competitive industrial performance index (CIP) and conclude that the progress in the greening of the manufacturing industry will contribute to the improving the industrial competitiveness of the EAEU countries.

Robust Distribution-Based Winsorization in Composite Indicators Construction

Composite indicators are widely used to determine the ranking of countries, organizations or individuals in terms of overall performance on multiple criteria. Their calculation requires standardization of the individual statistical criteria and aggregation of the standardized indicators. These operations introduce a potential propagation effect of extreme values on the calculation of the composite indicator of all entities. In this paper, we propose robust composite indicators for which this propagation effect is limited. The approach uses winsorization based on a robust estimate of the distribution of the sub-indicators. It is designed such that the winsorization affects only the composite indicator rank but has no effect on the entities ranking in each sub-indicator. The simulation study documents the benefits of distribution-based winsorization in the presence of outliers. It leads to a ranking that is closer to the clean data ranking when compared to the ranking obtained using either no winsorization or the traditional winsorization based on empirical quantiles. In the empirical application, we illustrate the use of winsorization for ranking countries based on the United Nations Industrial Development Organization’s Competitive Industrial Performance index. We show that even though the sub-indicator ranking does not change, the robust winsorization approach has a material impact on the ranking of the composite indicator for countries with large discrepancies in the scores of the sub-indicators.

Composite Measure of Industrial Performance for Cross-country Analysis

A country’s industrial performance can be assessed using a number of statistical indicators reflecting the level, growth and structure of industrial activities. However, policymakers prefer a single composite measure over a set of indicators to obtain an overall picture of their country’s relative performance compared to that of other countries. The paper describes UNIDO’s experience of constructing such a measure, namely the Competitive Industrial Performance (CIP) index, which considers countries’ productive capacity, intensity of industrialization and impact on the world market as major components of industrial performance. The compilation of the CIP index, however, poses two major challenges. First, the composite measure for a broad international comparison can only be constructed when data are available for all indicators and if the computation methodology is uniform across the countries. Second, as the final result is a normalized index used for country ranking, any uncertainty in one of the indicators may result in a shift of a given country in the overall ranking. The primary data source for the compilation of the CIP index is UNIDO’s database based on an underlying quality assurance framework for international comparability. To address the second problem, a sensitivity analysis is performed. The analysis reveals a substantially high correlation between the default CIP rankings and the alternatives, indicating that the composite measures are robust in a comparative assessment of countries’ industrial performance.

The Role of Production Networks in the Development of China and Other Developing East Asian Countries

Production networks have played important role in East Asian countries being the world’s factory and entering the process of convergence with the developed countries. Though there has been a rapid spread of production networks in all regions of the world, the East Asian model has its distinctive characteristics in terms of significance in the regional economy, geographic extensiveness involving a large number of countries in the region and degree of sophistication in both intra firm and arm’s length relationships across different firm nationalities. This does not, however, mean that the process has contributed to a decrease in the region’s dependence on the global economy. This work analyzes the strategies that have contributed to development of the developing East Asian countries and importance of the regional production networks. It is also revealed in this article that the dependence on EU and the US increase, despite the convergence between East Asian and developed countries, as clearly observed during 2008 global crisis. In this study, FDI inflows statistics of the UNCTAD, competitive industrial performance index of the UNIDO and GDP per capita and growth rate statistics of the World Bank and the statistics of other international institutions have been used.

The role of secondary education in explaining competitiveness

The literature establishes that education drives economic performance, but the extent that education is associated with a country's competitiveness is empirically untested. Our study analyses Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data from 63 countries to ascertain education's role in explaining the competitiveness of a country. Strong correlations were found for reading and science (each 53% shared variance) and mathematics (50%). Educational achievement explains 54% of Competitiveness. Regional differences were found with East Asia performing strongly both academically and in competitiveness, ahead of Europe, the rest of Asia, and South/Central America. Anglo-Saxon countries rank second academically behind East Asia, but in terms of competitiveness, the Anglo-Saxon cluster ranks first. We show that Anglo-Saxon countries' leadership in education and competitiveness have been challenged by East Asia. Our diachronic analysis shows that together with Competitive Industrial Performance, the cultural dimensions of Uncertainty Avoidance, Long-term Orientation and Indulgence Restraint, Education contributes to improvements in Competitiveness. The strength of East Asia in educational achievement will have implications for the region's future competitiveness compared to Anglo-Saxon and European countries. Our empirical findings support theoretical arguments for education's role in driving competitiveness. For education policy, the study emphasizes the importance of investments in reading, science and mathematics education.

COMPETITIVE INDUSTRIAL PERFORMANCE INDEX AND ITS DRIVERS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS ON TURKEY AND SELECTED COUNTRIES

Competitiveness of manufacturing industry is regarded as one of the basic determinants of long run sustainable growth of a country. Therefore it is important to have an understanding of relative positions of countries in terms of competitiveness and determinants of competitive ability. This study aims to reveal the standing of Turkey in a group of countries and analyze determinants of competitive ability. The competitive industrial performance (CIP) index, taken to be an indicator of relative competitive ability, has been calculated for a sample of 33 countries for years 1985, 1990, 1998 and 2002. Panel data methods then have been employed to reveal sources of competitive ability. Conducted analysis reveals Turkish manufacturing industry to be lagging behind many of the sample countries and presents a grim picture for sustainable development in medium and long run

Factors influencing the relative industrial performance of Japan, Germany, USA and UK. Part 1: Industrial structure, and capital and investment

The first of a series of three articles in which the author explores some of the underlying factors which continue to influence competitive industrial performance. In the post Second World War years Japan and Germany have built more prosperous economies than the UK and have seemingly threatened to overtake the USA. Social cohesion has provided their foundations for success, but in both countries it has been achieved too expensively. The author concludes that there is now enough evidence to guide the UK to emulate successful elements of their economies while avoiding their mistakes, but we need Government-led initiatives to improve vital industrial relationships.

Factors influencing the relative industrial performance of Japan, Germany, USA and UK. Part 2: Education, training, employment policies and management practices

In the second of three articles, the author continues to explore some of the underlying factors which have influenced competitive industrial performance. Topics covered include: relative positions; parent/teacher relationships; investment; school management; national syllabuses; priorities; employment policies; and management practices.

Alliance capitalism: the social organization of Japanese business

Business practices in Japan inspire fierce and even acrimonious debate, especially when they are compared to American practices. This book attempts to explain the remarkable economic success of Japan in the post-war period - a success it is useful to understand in a time marked by controversial trade imbalances and concerns over competitive industrial performance. Gerlach focuses on what he calls the intercorporate alliance, the innovative and increasingly pervasive practice of bringing together a cluster of affiliated companies that extends across a broad range of markets. The best known of these alliances are the keiretsu, or enterprise groups, which include both diversified families of firms located around major banks and trading companies and vertical families of suppliers and distributors linked to prominent manufacturers in the automobile, electronics and other industries. In providing a key link between isolated local firms and extended international markets, the intercorporate alliance has had profound effects on the industrial and social organization of Japanese businesses. Gerlach casts his net widely. He not only provides a rigorous analysis of intercorporate capitalism in Japan, making useful distinctions between Japanese and American practices, but he also develops a broad theoretical context for understanding Japan's business networks. Addressing economists, sociologists and other social scientists, he argues that the intercorporate alliance is as much a result of overlapping political, economic and social forces as traditional Western economic institutions such as the public corporation and the stock market. Most compellingly, Alliance Capitalism raises important questions about the best method of exchange in any economy. It identifies situations where cooperation among companies is an effective way of channelling corporate activities in a world marked by complexity and rapid change, and considers in detail alternatives to hostile takeovers and other characteristic features of American capitalism. The book also points to the broader challenges facing Japan and its trading partners as they seek to coordinate their distinctive forms of economic organization.

Diversification as a factor in U.K. industrial strategy

This article considers possible relationships between diversification and acquisition activity in the U.K. and the U.K.'s competitive industrial performance. Most diversification by U.K. companies during the last 20 years has been via acquisitions and mergers and not through the internal creation of new activities. Although not all acquisitions are carried out with diversification in mind, probably the great majority represent some form of diversification. It is assumed that the purpose of industrial strategy is to improve the performance of an economy over time and relative to competing countries. Improved performance should be observable through growth of output and productivity, the ability to export, the share of world trade obtained and the creation of employment.