Ireland has had significant competitiveness gains in the 1990s on the basis of the standard manufacturing unit labor cost-based measure of the real effective exchange rate. A handful of sectors mostly dominated by multinational companies have accounted for the bulk of value added in production....

Conceptual ambiguities and statistical weaknesses hamper the assessment of external competitiveness. The term competitiveness, while applied extensively, is often imprecisely defined, which can result in analytical errors and mistaken policy advice. Furthermore, aggregate statistical measures of...

This paper provides an assessment of competitiveness and external trade performance of the French manufacturing industry during the 1980s and early 1990s. The first part of the paper reviews developments in a broad range of competitiveness indicators. The analysis indicates that the...