What does the author lay stress on in the passage ?

Concept: A “what does the author lay stress on” question asks for the passage’s central claim — the one proposition the whole extract is built to establish — not for every topic that happens to be mentioned in it. The structural test is to ask, of each candidate idea, whether the author argues towards it or merely argues from it: the central claim is what the rest of the material exists to support, while a supporting idea is brought in as background, evidence or a stepping stone on the way to that claim.

Application: The extract takes the traditional economic inputs one at a time and reaches the same verdict about each of them.

• Labour: the low cost and high quality of Japanese workers conferred advantage for decades, then that advantage passed to South Korea, then Malaysia and Mexico, and today to China, while IT and service work moves from Europe and North America to India and Singapore. The author adds that such advantage “cannot be sustained through emergence of new competitors”.

• Capital: gold coins and later paper money once restricted financial flows, and regional concentrations of banks, industries and markets grew up in New York, London and Tokyo. Capital now flows internationally at rapid speed, so the capital concentrated in those centres is “no longer sufficient for competitive advantage”.

• Land: semiconductors are made principally of sand and common metals, designed in common office buildings with commercially available tools, and fabricated in factories in many industrialized nations — hence “land is not the key competitive resource in the semiconductor industry”.

Having shown each traditional input to be matchable by rivals, the author states the positive thesis directly: under “a knowledge-based theory of the firm”, organizational knowledge is treated as “a resource with at least the same level of power and importance as the traditional economic inputs”, and “an organization with superior knowledge can achieve competitive advantage in markets that appreciate the application of such knowledge”. Semiconductors, genetic engineering, pharmaceuticals, software and military warfare are then listed as knowledge-intensive arenas that bear this out.

Cross-check: Setting each offered idea against the structure of the argument makes the roles explicit.

Answer: The author lays stress on knowledge-driven competitive advantage — that once land, labour and capital can all be matched by competitors, it is superior organizational knowledge, combined and applied in a way rivals cannot readily imitate, that yields advantage sustainable over time.