The collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe marked a historical event for the countries on both sides of the iron curtain. Using the recently released EU KLEMS database on detailed sectoral growth and employment measures, we analyse the productivity performance in the period...

After the EU accession of the Visegrad countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) in 2004 one of the most remarkable developments was a sudden upturn in mutual trade of this region’s countries. In 2007 the value of aggregate intra-Visegrad trade was two and a half times...

Unit labour costs (ULCs) are one of the key economic variables considered in the context of globalization, competitiveness and production-location decisions. With the EU accession of eight Central and East European countries and their (almost) full inclusion in the European Single Market, the...

This report analyses the link between the industrial allocation of FDI and economic development, using a newly constructed data set on industrial FDI stocks for six individual manufacturing industries (food, textiles/wood, petroleum/chemicals/rubber/plastics, metals/mechanical products,...

Labour costs, tax burden and competitiveness in Austria compared with selected CEEs Summary The study analyses in an international comparison the key characteristics and recent developments of labour costs, taxation and productivity in Austria and selected CEEs (Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech...

Increasing fragmentation of production across borders is changing the nature of international competition. As a result, conventional indicators of competitiveness based on gross exports become less informative and new measures are needed. In this paper we propose an ex-post accounting framework...

One of the main stylised facts that has emerged from the recent literature on global value chains is that bilateral trade imbalances in gross terms can differ substantially from those measured in value added terms. However, the factors underlying the extent and sign of the differences between...

This paper describes the main features of Global Value Chains (GVCs) in the euro area taken as a whole and compares with other large trade players like the US, China and Japan. In addition, the perspective of individual euro area countries is considered, with a focus on intra euro area linkages....

This paper studies the great collapse in value added trade using a structural decomposition analysis. We show that changes in vertical specialisation accounted for almost half of the great trade collapse, while the previous literature on gross trade has mainly focused on final expenditure,...