The Changing Role of the State with Regard to Governance, Competitiveness, and International Economic Relations

Any country that aspires to sustainability and quality of life for its populace must have credentials to be both worth securing and be capable of securing inter-generational well-being with flows and partnerships across its borders. This pursuit of economic security through international economic relations is designed to facilitate the flow of goods, services, capital, ideas, information and natural persons. These flows induce domestic and foreign competition and encourage cross-border cooperation among interest groups. This process pervades governance frames, challenges notions of competitiveness and competition policies and fundamentally transforms international economic relations. The problematique raises many perplexing questions which this paper condenses into two main inquiries: How do the requirements of national governance, competitiveness and international regimes affect the Role of State in these three arenas? Which ways of harmonising the trine of governance, competitiveness and international economic relations are efficient, equitable and cost-effective? The paper presents a conceptual framework visualising international competitiveness and its impulses as onion- peels between the core necessities of what constitutes national governance and the bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral building blocks of international economics relations regimes. The paper analyses globalised and globalising sectors and national agendas to understand the strategic mapping of policy choices for U.S.A., EU, Japan, Russia, China, and India. The paper concludes that the role of the State must internalise national governance, competitiveness and international economic relations as necessary complements, not substitutes.