What determines a country's ability to compete in international markets? What fosters the global competitiveness of its firms? And in the European context, have key elements of the EU strategy such as EMU and enlargement helped or hindered domestic firms' competitiveness in local and global...

From a conceptual point of view there is little consensus of what should be the 'ideal indicator' of international cost and price competitiveness as each of the standard measures typically employed has its own merits and drawbacks. This calls for addressing the question from an empirical angle,...

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...

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...

We analyze the decline in the U.S. share of world merchandise exports against the backdrop of a model-based measure of competitiveness. We preliminarily use constant market share analysis and gravity estimations to show that the majority of the decline in export shares can be associated with a...

While there are many methods to measure the competitiveness of an economy, most of these concepts ignore the fact that competitiveness can change because of market processes like wage negotiation but also because of political decision-making. Governments that compete with others for factors of...

We investigate the impact of China as a global competitor on the trade performance of the ten Central, Eastern and Southeastern European EU Member States (CESEE-10) in the EU-15 market. The paper takes a comprehensive approach as we analyze export growth, export market shares, extensive and...

Increasing fragmentation of production across borders is changing the nature of international competition. As a result, conventional indicators of competitiveness based on gross exports become less informative and new measures are needed. In this paper we propose an ex-post accounting framework...

Building on the methodology pioneered by Feenstra (1994) and Broda and Weinstein (2006), we construct an export price index that adjusts for changes in the set of competitors (variety) and changes in non-price factors (quality in a broad sense) for nine emerging economies (Argentina, Brazil,...

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...