In most EU member states, the business services industry has booked no productivity growth during the last two decades. The industry's performance in the other member states was weaker than that of its US counterparts. Exploring what may be causing this productivity stagnation, this policy brief...

The paper investigates whether the poor productivity performance of the European business services industry is related to scale effects, market structure, and regulatory impacts. We apply parametric and nonparametric methods to estimate the productivity frontier and so obtain the distance of...