Cheio de sumo para a realidade portuguesa pré-troika, no tempo dos campeões nacionais

Escrito em 2001 acerca da realidade canadiana, cheio de sumo para a realidade portuguesa pré-troika:

"the study revealed a number of weaknesses in the microeconomic business environment that afflicted much of the economy. The absence of intense local rivalry combined with customers who were not demanding produced weak pressures for firm productivity and upgrading.
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We found many firms content to compete in Canada Portugal, with little orientation toward global competition. Those firms that did compete internationally tended to focus on the U.S. Espanha/Angola and pursue strategies that depended on natural resource advantages or lower labor costs than other G-7 competitors instead of sophisticated products and processes. Rather than seek out the most demanding customers both at home and abroad, Canadian Portuguese firms were inclined to serve the less demanding segments....We recommended that governments move aggressively to restore a favorable macroeconomic context for Canadian business by tackling the budget deficit and reducing personal and corporate tax rates. We also recommended that governments eliminate the barriers to inter-provincial trade and investment that relaxed competitive pressures and fractured an already small economy....we recommended that governments pursue policies to enhance the intensity of domestic competition rather than try to produce national champions shielded from competition in the home market....While some laud the lower Canadian dollar as enhancing competitiveness by decreasing the relative prices of our exports, the true effect is exactly the opposite. A low Canadian dollar dulls the incentive for upgrading and competing on any basis other than lower price. In addition, in the Canadian context, the low dollar makes investment in upgrading more expensive. Approximately 70% of Canada’s installed machinery and equipment is imported. Consequently, the low dollar during the 1990’s made machinery and equipment imports dramatically more expensive, which is likely to have contributed to a fall in the growth rate of capital stock per worker, thus making labour productivity growth still more difficult to achieve....Research on firm-level competitiveness has revealed the critical importance of a distinctive strategy. Firm-level competitive advantage rarely results from benchmarking against competitors and replicating their choices. Rather, competitiveness results from making a set of choices that produces a distinctive positioning and is manifested in a tailored system of activities. This activity system creates customer value distinct from competitors and makes replication by competitors difficult by confronting them with painful trade-offs. ...If the nation is to move forward, a greater proportion of Canadian Portuguese firms must make an alternative set of choices. These are shown on the right column in the figure.

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All industries today are “high-tech”, and can employ advanced technology. Every firm has the opportunity to develop competitive advantages building on unique strategic positions."

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Trechos retirados de "Canadian Competitiveness: A Decade after the Crossroads" de Michael Porter e Roger Martin.