Data science for measuring regional competitiveness

The term of “territorial attractiveness” is now shared by economists and economic geographers to identify a series of assets with which the territories are equipped. The intensity of individual assets and, even more importantly, a favorable combination of different assets can represent an attractive factor to direct preferences towards a given territory rather than another for residential and productive settlements, respectively of private citizens (residential attractiveness) of foreign and national investors (productive attractiveness). Less universally accepted is the use or rather the abuse of the concept of territorial competitiveness. Unlike the concepts of “utility” and “efficiency”, competitiveness is not a basic construct in economics and analyses of competitiveness have in general no fundamentals that are strictly anchored to economic theory.