Abstract:

Competitiveness plays a key role in creating the prosperity, efficiency, and productivity of an economic zone. This study is conducted to build and verify a scale of factors affecting the competitiveness of Nghi Son economic zone, Thanh Hoa province. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are applied. The collected data includes 108 enterprises operating in Nghi Son economic zone. After screening, the data is processed through the exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and description statistics to consider as a basis for the weighting scales. The research results indicate that: there are 4 groups of factors that directly affect the competitiveness of the economic zone, including: availability of the economic zone, the role of the economic zone management board, competitiveness platform at EZ level, and competitiveness platform at the enterprise level. The assessment of the importance of factor groups shows that the groups of indicators related to the advantage of input production factors are underestimated the role of intangible factors related to competing capability.