The essence of the competitiveness of the region

Abstract

The article reviews the approaches of various authors to the interpretation of the concept of "regional competitiveness”, and identifies their advantages, problems of scope and disadvantages of use of those approaches. The author provides a revised definition of "competitiveness of a region”, and specifies its scope and distinctive features. The author suggests to use the refined definition for the development of theory and practice of regional performance management, which, in his opinion, would allow to consider every feature of competition between territories and should guard against errors in methodology due to the exclusion of equality in the meaning of competitiveness of the region and its socio-economic potential, productivity and outcome of competition.