This article examines regional competitiveness from a geographical perspective, and constructs a competitiveness ranking for Colombian departments using principal components and hierarchical cluster techniques. The analysis shows that competitiveness becomes meaningless when it is applied to the goods market, but is meaningful when one considers the market and the mobility of production factors. The analysis also shows, unlike most approaches and measures of competitiveness for Colombian departments, that it is possible to obtain simple measures, which in addition to being consistent with the conceptual framework of economic geography, is the product of the combination of a small number of variables.
