Competitiveness of industry in Polish regions

The aim of the paper is to first identify the factors which determine the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector as an element of region’s competitive performance and then to determine their impact on economic performance, income and employment in the sector. The analyses were conducted for NUTS 3 for the period 2009–2011. Sixteen different diagnostic variables were adopted to describe entrepreneurship, innovativeness and competitiveness. Soft modelling was employed as a method to quantify regional competitiveness of the manufacturing sector as it allows an estimation of aggregate measures for latent variables and their interrelations.