The idea that market selection promotes survival and expansion of the “fittest” producersis a key principle underlying theories of competition. Yet, despite its intuitive appeal, thehypothesis that companies with superior productivity also exhibit higher growth lacks em-pirical support. One...

We propose the so-called domestic "embodied unit labor costs" (EULC) at the country-sector level as a new cost-related basis for measures of international competitiveness. EULC take into account that a sector's labor costs constitute only a small share of its total cost which to a large extent...