Unraveling the Origins of EU Countries Productivity Growth - Evidence on R&D and Competition from Cross-Country Industry Analysis

Over the last two decades EU countries experienced diverging productivity growthdevelopments. By examining the sources of EU countries growth drivers on the sectorallevel, the paper takes a new look on the influence of innovations. While standard neoclassicalNon-ICT capital deepening turns out the major contributor to EU productivitygrowth, detail industry analysis reveals that growth in innovation stocks via increasedR&D in specialized and science-based industries spurred productivity growth as well.But those effects are only found for Nordic and Western Continental EU countries,while others are lacking such effects. Moreover, these specialized and science-basedindustries experienced strong innovation and productivity growth by decreases in competition,thereby favoring Schumpeterian growth arguments for highly dynamic sectors.