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...

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...

The Euro Plus Pact was approved by 23 EU countries in March 2011 and came into force shortly afterwards. The Pact stipulates a range of quantitative targets meant to strengthen cost competitiveness with the aim of preventing the accumulation of external financial imbalances. This paper uses...

In this paper, we analyse export competition between individual EU Member States and China in third-country goods markets. We find that competitive pressure from China is strongest for small and peripheral EU members, especially for the Southern periphery, Ireland and Central, Eastern and...

The paper analyses the impact of import penetration on firms' profitability in 15 manufacturing industries in 10 euro area countries during 1995-2004, focusing on the role of emerging market economies. Our results indicate that import competition from emerging market economies has had an overall...

What drives external performance of countries? This is a recurring question in academia and policy. The factors underlying export growth are receiving great attention, as countries struggle to grow out of the crisis by increasing exports and as protectionist discourses take foot again. Despite...

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...