Since the mid-2000s price-competitiveness indicators for some euro-area countries have been providing conflicting signals. Against a stability of the producer price (PPI)-based measure, the manufacturing unit labour cost (ULCM)-deflated indicator points to a major competitiveness loss in Italy;...

Restoring competitiveness is broadly acknowledged as the critical building block for achieving sustainable growth, but defining competitiveness, both in terms of tools as well as objectives, is a matter of debate. • The Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet) adopts a pragmatic approach,...

Policy-making institutions such as the European Commission, the ECB and the OECD often use unit labor costs as a measure of international competitiveness. The goal of this paper is to examine how well this measure is related to international export performance at the firm level. To this end, we...

Drawing from confidential firm-level balance sheets for 17 European countries (13 Euro-Area), the paper documents the newly expanded database of cross-country comparable competitiveness-related indicators built by the Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet). The new database provides...

This paper provides a new cross-country evaluation of competitiveness, focusing on the linkages between productivity and export performance among European economies. We use the information compiled in the Trade module of CompNet to establish new stylized facts regarding the joint distributions...

While there are many methods to measure the competitiveness of an economy, most of these concepts do not sufficiently distinguish between how market factors influence competitiveness, and what governments can do to improve their competitive position. Disentangling market-induced and...

China's impressive export growth over past decades has raised concerns that European producers might be driven out of their traditional markets by cheap Chinese products. Further, the more subdued global demand that has been seen in recent years will lead to intensified competition over existing...

In this paper a semiparametric stochastic metafrontier approach is used to obtain insight into firm-level competitiveness in Europe. We differ from standard TFP studies at the firm level as we simultaneously allow for inefficiency, noise and do not impose a functional form on the input-output...