The article provides an overall overview of competitiveness and competitive advantage concepts found in the literature. Then the Author attempts to present competitiveness as an aggregate composed of such components as competitive potential, competitive position competition strategy, or competition instruments. This provides a point of departure for a proposed cause-effect chain of enterprise competitiveness, i.e. for specifying cause-effect relationships which determine the ability to compete on the market. The final section of the article is devoted to presentation of measuring methods of competitiveness (competitive position).