As policymakers refocus on growth, the ability to take a firm-level view is key to disentangling the various factors at the root of competitiveness, and thus to designing appropriate policies. â?¢ Firm-level data provides critical information for the design of appropriate competitiveness...

Competitiveness is one of the most debated issues in policy circles. But, what triggers it? Capitalising on the first existing harmonised cross-country dataset measuring the entire range of international activities of firms in seven European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy,...

This Bruegel blueprint analyses, within the framework of the EFIGE (European Firms in a Global Economy) project, the export and foreign investment performance of European firms. It is based on new cross-country data from 15,000 individual firms never available before. Written by Giorgio Barba...

This paper describes the EU-EFIGE/Bruegel-UniCredit dataset (in short the EFIGE dataset), a database recently collected within the EFIGE project (European Firms in a Global Economy: internal policies for external competitiveness) supported by the Directorate General Research of the European...

The European market for asset-backed securities (ABS) has all but closed for business since the start of the economic and financial crisis. ABS (see Box 1) were in fact the first financial assets hit at the onset of the crisis in 2008. The subprime mortgage meltdown caused a deterioration in the...

The new EU leadership â?? the president of the European Commission and his team of commissioners, and the presidents of the European Council and of the European Parliament â?? will have to address pressing challenges. Go to eu2do.bruegel.org to read all the Memos, download the individual Memos...