Technical-economical competitiveness of food industry

Abstract

In the literature, different definitions of competitiveness exist. The EU Commission (2003) uses as a definition of competitiveness: the ability of an economy to provide its population with high and rising standards of living and a high level of employment for all those willing to work, on a sustainable basis‖. Another definition which is more focused on the manufacturing (Lall, 2001) sectors states: competitiveness in industrial activities means developing relative efficiency along with sustainable growth. According to Canada‘s Agri-Food competitiveness Task Force competitiveness is defined as: the sustained ability to profitably gain and maintain market share (Martin, Westgren &van Duren, 1991; Fischer and Schornberg, 2007). At the firm level, the view of competitiveness can be given as (Buckley, et al., 1988): A firm is competitive if it can produce products and services of superior quality and lower costs than its domestic and international competitors. This paper presents a new approach of technical-economical competitiveness for food industry, and a new type of competitive management of them, so that their technical-economical performance be maximized.