Cultural Attributes and National Competitiveness of Trade Partner Countries

For enhancing trade competitiveness, it is important to understand the business environment and cultural attributes of our partner countries. This paper has two objectives. One is to identify discrepancies between objectivity and subjectivity in evaluating national competitiveness. The other is to analyze cultural attributes in the measurement of national competitiveness. We found four interesting results. First, there exists a distinctive difference between hard and survey data among ten countries. Second, a high coefficient of internal consistency was found when measuring six items of each culture variable. Third, as a result of factor analysis using measurement items of culture variables, most items were classified as possessing a few common factors. Fourth, from the cluster analysis, the cluster group of culture variables coincides with the recognition type of competitiveness evaluation for the most part. These findings mean that national competitiveness is closely related with culture variables, and that cultural attributes actually influence the evaluation and measurement of national competitiveness.