From the Concept to the Measurement of Sustainable Competitiveness: Social and Environmental Aspects
From the Concept to the Measurement of Sustainable Competitiveness: Social and Environmental Aspects

Summary/Abstract: This paper offers an extensive review of Sustainable Competitiveness as an integrating concept bridging the main aspects of current understandings around sustainable development encompassing economic, social and environmental sustainability. This review focuses on identifying effective metrics to support sustainable competitiveness from a cross-country perspective.We propose metrics based on the Sustainability Adjusted Global Competitiveness Index (SGCI), which comprehensively measures sustainable competitiveness. The SGCI was recently proposed (2013) by the World Economic Forum to build on its longer-standing GCI covering over 140 countries. Not only does the SGCI offer a synthetic productivity-based foundation for measuring sustainable competitiveness but also permits identification of specific policy areas where improvements might significantly extend. The approach enables disaggregation between three separate elements that offer explanatory power for measures of sustainable competitiveness, namely Basic Conditions, Efficiency Enhancers and Innovation Conditions. It is concluded that extending the measurement of the SGCI - cognisant of data limitations - offers potential for considering international competitiveness performance from environmental and social sustainability perspectives. Extensions to SGCI are also proposed. These are to be examined empirically, in subsequent research, across a broad sample of economies.

• Details
• Contents