International competitiveness: agreed goal, hard task

Pursuing International Competitiveness in Iranian Wheat Policy

After the war with Iraq which ended in 1988, Iran implemented several agricultural support policies based on Five-Year National Development Plans. The main objective of these plans in the agriculture sector was to make the agricultural economy more market-oriented and to encourage sustainable agriculture. This paper investigates the extent to which Iran's government has been able to achieve thi...

Business Taxes and International Competitiveness

Around the world, policymakers are obsessed with the competitiveness of their domestic companies and domestically based multinational corporations (MNCs). Such concerns frequently influence policy, especially tax policy. In this paper, I develop a theory of how taxes affect the international competitiveness of businesses. I then use that theory to evaluate basic tax policy decisions, such as th...

South Africa’s International Cost Competitiveness

China's International Competitiveness: Reassessing the Evidence

In this paper we argue that export data are an inadequate tool to measure a country’s international competitiveness when external trade is dominated by export-processing trade. Export data do not necessarily reflect the value produced in an exporting country, but rather capture the gross value of the products that leave a country’s ports. We demonstrate that, in the case of China, this leads to...

Goal Systems International

The Supermarket Supply Chain Example A few years ago, I was enlisted by an executive vice-president of a large American supermarket chain to help focus their improvement efforts at their semi-annual supply chain conference. This supermarket corporation operated 1,800 retail stores and 125 distribution centers throughout the western two-thirds of the United States. The 35 participants in this su...