I summarize the main results and policy insights from the 2011 EIB Conference on “Productivity and Long-Term Growth Potential in Europe”. Europe’s need for productivity growth has become more pressing against the backdrop of huge government debt and a beginning slowdown in labour supply....

Europe is lagging behind other developed economies in the availability and use of very fast broadband services. The recently introduced Digital Agenda for Europe initiative sets forward ambitious targets for the development of super-fast broadband infrastructures in Europe to foster smart and...

We set out to decompose government investment, seeking especially to estimate how much governments in Europe invest in infrastructure in general and transport infrastructure in particular. It is concluded that infrastructure accounts for about one-third of overall government investment in the EU...

There is plenty of evidence for market failures that motivate government intervention for innovation in general and research and development (R&D) in particular. R&D subsidies are a policy tool of major importance - both in theory and practice. The empirical evidence for the effectiveness of R&D...

Volume 13 of the EIB Papers contains the results of the 2008 EIB Conference on "Infrastructure investment, growth and cohesion". Issue 1 discusses the volume, composition, determinants and growth effects of government and infrastructure investment and highlights the economic cost of funds and...

Is international production sharing associated with stronger competitiveness? We address this question from the complementary viewpoints of firms and industries. We show that international production sharing is indeed associated with stronger competitiveness not only at the firm level but also...

Drawing on the OECD’s structural analysis (STAN)database, this paper contributes to the understanding of European economic growth through a decomposition into employment and productivity, across sectors, and across different time periods and countries. The US productivity surge from the...

In this paper, we review theory and evidence on the links between product market regulations that curb competitive pressures, the efficiency of resource allocation and productivity growth. We show that product market regulations differ across countries and industries and have evolved differently...

Countries differ substantially in the extent to which more productive firms are large and/or are becoming larger and less productive firms are small and/or becoming smaller. A challenge for both emerging and advanced economies is that achieving such static and dynamic allocative efficiency...

The revival in US productivity growth since the mid-1990s is linked to a surge in investment in information and communication technologies (ICT). Against the backdrop of a weakening link between productivity and traditional innovation inputs (e.g. R&D expenditure), digitization has spurred...