Abstract

Over the last three decades there has been growing interest in international competitiveness research. However, as evidenced by the academic literature, there is a lack of systematic chronological studies synthesizing how this field has evolved over time. The main aim of this paper is to consolidate the state of the art of academic research on international competitiveness in the discipline of economics by using a new method: a bibliometric study of the economics literature published over the past 70 years. Citation data is collected from Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar, and it is analysed using HistCite, Pajek and VOSviewer software. Using bibliometric indicators, network citation analysis, key-routes main path methodology and term co-occurrence analysis, it investigates the growth pattern of the international competitiveness literature, identifies the core journals and authors, the main paths of knowledge diffusion and the key research domains in the international competitiveness literature. The results of the analysis show that studies on international competitiveness have been and still are important and popular in economics. International competitiveness concepts come from models of competition and are not strongly connected with classical theories of international trade. Publications by Krugman, Fagerber and Balassa have made the greatest contributions to the development of international competitiveness studies, but only Krugman’s works have been significant in terms of knowledge diffusion. International competitiveness mostly refers to international trade/export performance and to the impacts of cost, price, exchange rates, income and FDI. However, in the last decade the relationships between trade flows and technology, liberalization processes, environmental regulations, location, education/human capital and productivity have become key topics in international competitiveness studies.

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