Puerto Rico is a privileged island, due to it’s location, education and geography.

The countries
have an excellent competitiveness, evaluating this from our environment, the quality of public
institutions and the human education quality seen as the “human capital”. In this paper the
author describes the competitiveness of a country as “the ability of the firm or industry to
accomplish best performance in terms of profits in comparison with it’s competitors”. Some
items are crucial to the development of a good economy and competitiveness ambient. There are
a few factors that promote the competitiveness in the economy and they are: human resource,
natural resource, capital, infrastructure, demands, related and supporting industries, strategy and
structure. Right now we are privileged or rich in talent, environment and location in the global
market. We need to take advantage of these factors to create and develop ideas that consistently
keeps our country on track.

The role of the government and the influence of it have a direct impact. They need to
promote and improve the education, R&D, infrastructure, tax incentives and ensuring the
availability of investments and keeps the capital. In the industry, the island was loosing
competitiveness since 1996, where the changes on the federal benefits from section 936 Internal
Revenue Code begun. More industries were left, but the exportation rate of the island increases
until 2002, it because the industries that keep competitive increases the exportations during that
period. These industries were just minority and are in the areas of materials and metals,
petroleum and chemicals, semiconductors and computers, food and beverages, house and
household and healthcare. If some global changes affect these few industries the local economy
could get in serious problems. We need to stimulate the inclusion of other sectors, using the
advantage of our position in the map and our relationship with the United States.

The economy needs to consider improve the industry of services. In the actual economy
the tourism is a service based industry that generates a conglomerate of services. Following it the
development of services industries, that depends on the human resources, not in the government
decisions and incentives. The skills of human resources for the manufacturing are crucial for
some industry when they consider moving to another country where the salaries are lower,
because the human resources were producing high quality outputs. On sectors like Surgical and
medical Instruments Industry, the people has been distinguished for improve and innovation with
precision on the handling of raw materials and process assemblies. In the island, a large amount
of humans resources are graduated from universities, that strongly support the initiative,
competitiveness and the potential for export services. In the pharmaceutical Industry the local
demands do not affect the industry, because the export of the production is almost completely.
We need to take advantage of these kinds of industries, but keeping in mind the industries like
the agricultural chemicals was very advanced and could be export to many places in the world.
The Food preparation industry have a great potential to export, due to the weather, quantity of
water available and the high level of academic preparation to develop it, and send the Puerto
Rican flavor to the world, including the exportation of our products to the high volume of latin
emigrants in the United States. The industry of Food preparations have a rich expertise in the
island and some firms contract the experience of ours mechanical and chemical engineers to
solve their industries problems. We have the talent here! Here are some recommendations:

References:

Vega-Rosado, Luz Leyda1 luz-vega@sg.inter.edu

Journal of Global Competitiveness; 2006, Vol. 14 Issue 2, p95-111, 17p
Berman, E. (1990). Government, politics and economic competitiveness in the
global economy. Journal of Interamerican Studies & World Affairs 32, 3-4.

Porter, M. E. (2003, August – October) The economic performance of regions.

Regional Studies. Vol. 37: 549-578.