Raising manufacturing productivity is of central importance to the developing world and an essential element of policy making. Overcoming Barriers to Competitiveness is about establishing the most reliable analysis of manufacturing productivity possible and helping policy makers set their priorities. The paper demonstrates that productivity rests on five elements of the economy: infrastructure, capital, trade, education and aggregate efficiency. These factors, when multiplied together, give a true picture of a country’s situation on the productivity “league table”. More than a simple comparison, this ranking system allows the identification of which elements in each particular national or regional case require most attention. This approach can be viewed as another way of addressing the so-called “competitiveness problem” of poor countries. It does not say, however, that other areas can be totally neglected; one of the main points of the paper is that all five elements have to be ...