La productividad y competitividad en los servicios españoles.¿Cómo ha afectado la reciente crisis económico-financiera?

Productivity has become, since the nineties, as one key factor in analyzing the international competitiveness. On other side, the measurement and analysis of the productivity within the service sector has been widely debated in the recent years. Following this motivation, this paper analyzes the relationships between competitiveness, productivity and labour costs in the Spanish services industries since 1995 onwards. Our two main value added to the existing literature are the disaggregated analysis within services and the focus on the differences provoked by the last economic crisis. The main result suggests that non cost related factors have a key role in explaining the competitiveness of some service activities, partially refuting some conventional theories on international trade.