D. Competitive Advantage & Foreign Direct Investment
Content:
Labour productivity and absolute / comparative advantage. Relative factor endowment and competitiveness in general equilibrium theory. Competitiveness without an external balance. Imperfect competition and relative profit margins. Product variety. Quality and R&D. Distributional issues. Competitiveness-upgrading policies and location strategies. Export-orientation and import-substitution. Preconditions of efficient absorptive capacity and knowledge accumulation. Embeddedness of foreign owned subsidiaries, spillovers, externalities and linkages. Economic versus development zones. Dependency reversal. Looping Foreign Direct Investment and competitiveness.
Learning outcomes:
- Engage critically with concepts of competitive advantage and international competitiveness in a global economy emerging from academic, professional and promotional literature as well as the discourse of international organisations.
- Identify possible determinants of competitive advantage in concrete national/sub-national territories in relation to direct investment, especially foreign.
- Benchmark competitive advantage/s internationally across economic sectors.
- Critically evaluate and design national/sub-national development strategies, economic policies and practices in relation to the optimisation of competitive advantage/s and the promotion of investment.
- Critically integrate insights from studies across diverse academic disciplines concerned with development issues into a comprehensive and evolving grasp of the interplay between various determinants of competitive advantage nationally and globally.
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