This paper analyses the impact of changes in environmental regulations on productivity growth at country- and firm-level. We exploit several data sources and the environmen-tal policy stringency index, to evaluate the Porter hypothesis, according to which firms’ productivity can benefit from...

Composition of the euro area workforce evolves over time and in response to changing labour market conditions. We construct an estimate of growth in euro area labour quality over the period 1983-2004 and show that labour quality has grown on average by 0.6% year-on-year over this time period....

While there are many methods to measure the competitiveness of an economy, most of these concepts ignore the fact that competitiveness can change because of market processes like wage negotiation but also because of political decision-making. Governments that compete with others for factors of...

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...

In this paper a semiparametric stochastic metafrontier approach is used to obtain insight into firm-level competitiveness in Europe. We differ from standard TFP studies at the firm level as we simultaneously allow for inefficiency, noise and do not impose a functional form on the input-output...

The Euro Plus Pact was approved by 23 EU countries in March 2011 and came into force shortly afterwards. The Pact stipulates a range of quantitative targets meant to strengthen cost competitiveness with the aim of preventing the accumulation of external financial imbalances. This paper uses...

This paper provides a new cross-country evaluation of competitiveness, focusing on the linkages between productivity and export performance among European economies. We use the information compiled in the Trade module of CompNet to establish new stylized facts regarding the joint distributions...

It has been argued that the increasing importance of global value chains necessitates a modification of conventional competitiveness measures. We compile a broad dataset including value added trade, gross exports and conventional and value added based real exchange rates. To sharply focus on...

What determines a country's ability to compete in international markets? What fosters the global competitiveness of its firms? And in the European context, have key elements of the EU strategy such as EMU and enlargement helped or hindered domestic firms' competitiveness in local and global...