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| THE CONTROVERSY AND IMPLICATION OF REGIONAL COMPETITIVENESS |
| SHUI Wei1 |
1. Department of Eco-agriculture and Rural Development, Sichuan Agricultural University, Ya'an 625014, China;
2. School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China |
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Abstract The regional competitiveness has multi-dimensional geographical levels, which can be divided into different regional levels from nations to districts. The concept of regional competitiveness has been a long-standing issue in spite of its diversified understanding, which has been regarded as the productivity, the innovative ability, the regional environment, the enterprise and the industrial competitiveness, the regional wealth creativity, the ability of resources attraction and disposition, the capacity of export trade, the macro-competitiveness & micro-competitiveness and so on. Moreover, since Prof. Paul Krugman, a famous international trade specialist, questioned the concept of regional competitiveness in 1994, some of researchers began to doubt whether regional competitiveness is a significant concept. This article reviews the correlative research and arguments about the regional competitiveness, and obtains the enlightenment from all sorts of controversy as follows: 1) The final goal of regional competitiveness is to increase the regional wealth, promote the regional prosperity, and improve the income & living standard of inhabitant. 2) The regional competitiveness regards economic competitiveness as the core; Accordingly, its central tasks are to maintain the sustainable, rapid and healthy development of economy. 3) The regional competitiveness is the ability to improve resident's living standard, and create the regional wealth. 4) The regional competitiveness is a kind of synthesized capability, which depends on many elements and interaction. 5) The regional competitiveness can be studied from different angles and levels. 6) The various emphasis of different research on regional competitiveness, to some extent, reflects overall understanding of target's regional development. Finally, the article redefines the concept of regional competitiveness. The author makes it clear that the regional competitiveness is the creativity of the high productivity of the enterprise and the industrial clusters, the sustainable and rapid growth, and a systemic capability of regional prosperity and social harmony, when a region competes with regions.
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Received: 01 July 2008
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2010, Vol. 25 
