Restoring competitiveness requires reducing wages relative to Germany.
Sara Bianchi, Kerry's policy adviser, acknowledged yesterday that competitiveness requires that some overseas customers must be supplied from production facilities abroad.
Without the ability to devalue, the restoration of competitiveness requires painful austerity measures and wage restraint.That leads to another potential flashpoint for 2011: the lack of global co-ordination.
He makes a strong case: sustaining economic growth and competitiveness requires China to get beyond mere labour-driven manufacturing and into the knowledge-based business of discoveries, inventions and other advances.Yet doing so will be hard, not least because of the country's well-earned reputation for pervasive academic and scientific misconduct.
Policy reforms to improve competitiveness require perseverance because they often take time to bear fruit, and too many leaders today are prepared to sacrifice long-term prosperity for short-term popularity.
The increasing emphasis on higher education in China, India and other emerging economies is testimony to the near-universal agreement that success in this world, not to mention national competitiveness, requires more, not less, higher education.
"Trust that the HBCU community will continue to press for the kind of funding that educational excellence and national competitiveness require!" Wilson's sentiments echo those of Dillard University's president, Walter M. Kimbrough.
And maintaining competitiveness will require running to stay still because of globalisation.
The collapse of the pound has only begun, and is in danger of going well beyond what our trading competitiveness might require.
Indeed, for countries such as Greece, Portugal and Spain, regaining competitiveness would require them to lower the prices of their own products relative to the rest of the eurozone by about 30%, compared with the beginning of the crisis.
