There are no official statistics on international online trade in goods so far. This paper uses a consumer survey to construct a unique matrix of online B2C domestic and cross-border trade in goods between the 27 EU Member States. We compare online and offline trade patterns for similar goods....

This note presents a non-technical summary of the latest economic research studies on cross-border e-commerce in the EU and elsewhere, and combines this with findings from older research on this subject. It compares online with offline cross-border trade and investigates the differences in...

An important EU Digital Single Market policy objective is to achieve an open and integrated market for online e-commerce in the EU, to make it easy for consumers to go outside their domestic market and shop online in other EU Member States. This study applies a standard gravity model of...

The EU seeks to create a seamless online Digital Single Market for media products such as digital music and film. The territoriality of the copyright regime is often perceived as an obstacle that induces geographical segmentation. This paper provides empirical evidence on the extent of market...

Against the background of increasing competition and other significant structural changes implied by globalisation, maintaining and enhancing competitiveness has evolved into one of the prime concerns in most countries. Following up on previous work (see in particular ECB Occasional Papers No....

In the euro area, there is mixed evidence that the GDP per capita of lower-income economies has been catching up with that of higher-income economies since the start of monetary union. The significant real convergence performance of some of the most recent members contrasts with that of the...

This occasional paper reviews the macroeconomic developments in the euro area countries over the past 20 years. It analyses the accumulation of macroeconomic imbalances in the first decade of the EMU and their unwinding during the second decade. It shows that while flow imbalances have been...

Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is about twice as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30 percent. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and...

Using the results of the Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (2009 to 2020 editions), this paper aims to assess the effect of Covid-19 pandemic on the probabilities of firm to innovate and grow and to compare their likelihood with that of the previous downturn. To control for a...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the interplay between structural change, interpreted as the secular process of sectoral transformation, and labour productivity growth in the EU in several new dimensions. First, based on the latest data, we document the size of the negative effect that...