Regulating Competition or Promoting Competitiveness and Resilience?

Following up on the famous Draghi-report (2024) and against the background of the new EU Competitiveness Compass (2025), promoting competitiveness and resilience - also (or even particularly) at the expense of competition - is at the heart of many policy discussions and initiatives at the moment. However, while concepts and theories of competition explicitly exist in economics (as well as, for instance, in sports sciences) and have been developed to detail, the term competitiveness does not correspond to sound theory-driven understanding and conceptualisation. Consequently, the term competitiveness is often used in a loose and ambivalent way. Furthermore, while resilience rests on a clear and explicit conceptualization, its interrelation to competition and competitiveness – as well as the interrelation between the latter two – is poorly exploited in research so far. In order to contribute to filling this gap, this paper analyses the interrelations of prominent concepts of competition, competitiveness, and resilience and their compatibilities, complementarities, and conflicts. The analysis shows that modern theories and concepts of competition stand in line with resilience whereas the market power resulting from low competition intensity violates resilience under reasonable assumptions (imperfect political processes, presence of lobbyism and vested interests). Competitiveness displays an ambiguous interrelation to both competition and resilience: depending on the chosen concept of competitiveness, it can either be a complement or stand in sharp conflict to the other two concepts. The paper finally extends the politico-economic perspective to evaluate likely benefits and pitfalls from the current policy change against the background of lobby powers and imperfect political and administrative governance. Due to its unclear and ambiguous meanings, successful regulatory capture is significantly more likely in a competitiveness-focused policy approach than with a competition-focused one. While in theory, resilience performs similar to competition, its relative novelty as an economic policy goal may – under circumstances described in the paper – enhance the risk of regulatory capture compared to a competition-focused approach. Altogether, an imperfect world with imperfect and fallible knowledge/information, imperfect governance in politics and administration, and relevant lobby power by vested interests in tendency favours a competition-focused approach in case of conflict to notions of competitiveness and resilience.