Competitiveness in the Palestinian Food Industries Horizons and Development

Competitiveness has been considered as one of the important topics which have been significantly targeted by economists, politicians, businessmen, and many researchers in several fields such as economics, management, statistics, law, politics, industry, and engineering. In the first chapter of this dissertation, we discussed many of the theoretical frames which have given arise to relative theories, proposals, and concepts. Consequently, seeking competitive potential and process according to Porter’s suggestions is a major factor that revealed ambiguity and interpreted the reasons beyond some firm’s success and other firm’s failure. In spite of some criticisms that have been directed to Porter’s suggestions, they still represent a reference that could be honestly relied upon. We browsed the Palestinian economy and its structure in general, the private sector and the industry sector specifically, and food industry in details. We concluded that the Palestinian economy, though it has been partially released from Israeli constraints, is still imprisoned by the Israeli economy. In addition, this economy is constantly susceptible even to the minimum political changes, hence this defectiveness in the economy structure and the impact of this defectiveness on performance. Concerning the food industry, we deliberated the growth phases of this industry. In this we found the strong fetters of Israeli occupation that negatively influence this industry as much as the Palestinian National Authority positively influence it. The research indicated that this industry is one of the most fast sectors in growing, notably in the last decade of the last century. We observed the notable growth of plants and the number of employees, and the growth in the market share in the local market. The impact of this industry over the Palestinian consumer purchasing basket has been targeted by the research paper. The relative large size of investment in this sector and the satisfying number of employed labors have also been depicted. It is worth mentioning that we discussed the characteristics of this industry by which we found that the most of these plants are individually owned and the nature of ownership is inherited. With regard to employment size in these plants, it is under requirement level which indicates the small size of these factories. An obvious characteristic of this industry is its dependency on the foreign and the Israeli raw materials, and the shortage in engineers, professionals, specialized labs, and the up-to-date managerial and industrial mechanisms. In addition to competitive potential and process approach, we built a statistical model that is considered as an estimation of two regression equations; the first studies the producers, and the second studies the consumers. Through experimenting of some variables that are expected to have a direct influence on increasing competitiveness of Palestinian food industries, we found that lots of variables we suggested are really relative. Finally we drew some conclusions in this research and listed down our recommendations for the people in charge to do their best in solving the plethora of problems that we came up with through our results in this research.