The Right Place: How National Competitiveness Makes or Breaks Companies

The Right Place explains why firms succeed in one country and fail in another, irrespective of their inner drivers, and suggests potential initiatives that governments can take to help the private sector create jobs and, consequently, make their countries more prosperous.

The competitiveness race is not unlike a cycling race. If you want to ride fast, you need three things: a good bike, to be in good shape, and a smooth and fast road. In a collaborative model, you might say the business is the bicycle, the business leader is the cyclist, and the road is the government and the external environment. The responsibility of a government is to design and build the best possible road. It turns out that when the road is good, good cyclists suddenly appear and want to race on it. In this book, competition and macroeconomics expert, Arturo Bris, provides the analysis of country competitive performance based on 30 years advising countries on this topic. The typical mistakes that countries make are revealed and the pillars necessary in building a competitive economy: economic performance as a necessary condition for prosperity; government efficiency, so the public sector can create the conditions for a productive economy; business efficiency, so companies can create jobs; and infrastructure, both tangible and intangible, so businesses and individuals can operate efficiently.

With contemporary case studies throughout, the book provides an illuminating read for politicians, business leaders and students of macroeconomics.

Arturo Bris is professor of finance at IMD and the director of the world-renowned IMD World Competitiveness Center. He works with governments all over the world assessing, measuring, and managing the competitiveness of countries. He was previously an associate professor at the Yale School of Management and is a member of the advisory board of the Wealth Management Institute in Singapore and of the Strategic Board of Debiopharm. He regularly speaks at events and conferences in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. He has had articles published in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and also in Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Straits Times, and Handelsblatt among many others.