Analyse comparée de la productivité des firmes européennes à partir de données comptables: L'effet pays en cause

This paper aims at measuring the productivity gap between firms located in six European countries over the period 1996-2007 and to provide some explanations of the observed differences. Our approach is original for two reasons. Firstly the value added and the productivity are valued from the BACH database that proposes harmonized balance sheets. Secondly, we take into account the influence of environment and institutional factors on the firms' performance thanks to the use of a fixed effects panel data model that allows to assess the unobserved heterogeneity in a sample. This analysis is made at the national level for the whole economy, for three industries (manufacturing industry, construction and services) and for three groups of size (small, medium and large). The results allow to highlight the existence of different productive configurations attested by the different levels of firms' productivity according to size or industry. They also point out a «country effect» that embeds a set of organizational and institutional elements besides production factors.