IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-23870-5_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

International Competitiveness

In: Opening up Hungary to the World Market

Author

Listed:
  • Jochen Lorentzen

    (Prague College of the Central European University)

Abstract

Most studies on international competitiveness of the CPEs focus on the technological quality of Eastern European exports to the West and go into all kinds of comparisons with the NICs. Technology, of course, is only one factor affecting competitiveness. But the literature on the CMEA has largely refrained from references to, for example, cultural attitudes to explain the quality or quantity of production in Central Europe. The difference of the Eastern European worker from the committed (Confucianist and Shintoist) Japanese automobile worker or the disciplined, hardworking Korean shipbuilder surfaced only when the CPEs embarked on their transition and ran into major difficulties: the reforms in Russia are stalling, one is informed, because the orthodox Russian farmer is not up to it. Predictably, not everybody agrees. ‘The idea that East Europeans need to be taught the basic facts of economic life was always absurd. Forty years of rationing, shortages and thriving black markets were an excellent course in elementary economics — better, perhaps, than a century or two of capitalism whose beneficiaries take the miracle of supply and demand for granted’ (‘Pioneers of capitalism’, 1992). Individual attitudes clearly do influence national (and, for that matter, regional) production processes.

Suggested Citation

  • Jochen Lorentzen, 1995. "International Competitiveness," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Opening up Hungary to the World Market, chapter 3, pages 91-150, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-23870-5_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-23870-5_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-23870-5_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.