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Industrial revolutions marked rapid structural transformation in the manufacturing sector making changes to production processors and products while reshaping the lifestyle across the world. Industrial revolutions redefined the product identity of every individual economy with the changes of specializations acquired through different manufacturing sectors. Similarly, new sets of countries emerged as industrial input providers as well as output buyers. At the same time, the world specialization in the manufacturing sector diversified along with the expansion of global value chains. As a result, the final product is assembled in one location while a multitude of components is produced globally by different countries. The intention of the article is to examine the shift of global competitiveness throughout the last two decades with the emergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolutionary implications especially among Developed Economies and Newly Industrial Economies. The international competitiveness of a country is mainly decided by the relative cost of production. The relative cost is again decided by the productivity, availability of quality resources including labor, cost of doing business, favourable macroeconomic factors, and institutional factors. The main objective of this study is to focus the attention on the reshaping of the global competitiveness map along the timeline as a result of technological spikes known as industrial revolutions paying special attention to the fourth industrial revolution. The secondary sources are tapped for the necessary information and mixed-method is applied to analyze the gathered data. The implications of the fourth industrial revolution show the reshaping of the global competitiveness landscape faster than the previous industrial revolutions. Countries with more commercialized innovations, intellectual property rights, and adopting key technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data analytics, the internet of things, cloud computing, 3D printing, and simulations in production are at the forefront of the competitiveness in the manufacturing sector.
Dewanarayana et al. (Tue,) studied this question.