Objective - This paper aims to contribute to inclusive development literature by empirically verifying that some "smart" or "knowledge-and innovation-related" competitiveness enhancing factors, besides raising competitiveness and growth, enable inclusiveness and sustainability.

Methodology/Technique - The methodology used includes making ranks of frontier, advanced countries based on World Economic Forum data regarding competitive quantities and qualities of smart factors and growth and inclusive and sustainable outcomes. Then, a Spearman's rank correlation analysis is used to determine the similarities between each factor rank and each outcome rank.

Findings - The smart factors show a significant relationship with both growth and inclusiveness/sustainability outcomes; this may be a target for use as policy instruments to promote both growth and inclusiveness. The study found that higher levels of business-sophistication and network-related training, access and use of existing-technology, and ICT utilization factors contribute to higher levels of growth and also infer higher levels of employment, intergeneration eco-adjusted savings and lower levels of inequality, poverty and carbon intensity.

Novelty - Given that current government and international organization policies aimed at improving competitiveness/growth vis-à-vis inclusiveness/sustainability remain separated, the results of this study may assist in improving the collaboration between these two objectives. The policy implications of this study include: certain dual competitive-inclusive enhancing policies can be suitably designed and targeted to uplift smart elements and the acceleration of inclusiveness and sustainability alongside the competitiveness-growth nexus. Further, developing countries may learn to leapfrog the development frontier without developing competitiveness and inclusiveness/sustainability separately, but rather each at a time.

Type of Paper: Empirical.

Keywords: Competitiveness; Inclusive Development; Smart Policy; Sustainability; Frontier Transformation.

JEL Classification: O20, O32, O38, O43, P48, Q30, Q50.