Authors: Maria Bas, Philippe Martin and Thierry Mayer

Non price competitiveness is an important issue for European firms given that they produce in a high wage environment. However, non price competitiveness is difficult to measure, more anyway than price or cost competitiveness. This is true at the firm or at a more aggregate such as sector or country level. Whereas price competitiveness implies low prices,non price competitiveness implies higher demand for a given price. This can come from higher quality, differentiation, better design, brand image, associated services.

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Authors: Maria Bas, Philippe Martin and Thierry Mayer

This report reviews the state of the art of the literature on measures of quality adjusted competitiveness. The report starts by an analysis of how the recent theoretical literature on heterogeneous firms’ trade models has introduced product quality on both the demand and the supply side. The first family of models relies on the idea that consumers value quality. The valuation of quality is reflected on their willing to pay a higher price for high quality goods. On the supply side, firms’ quality choice depends on the quality of inputs (skill labor or intermediate goods) used in the production of final goods. Also, producing high-quality goods is costly with marginal costs increasing in the level of quality of the final good but also involves a sunk investment cost in quality upgrading. The paper presents the recent empirical methodologies developed in the literature to estimate product quality using microdata.

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Authors: Lionel Fontagné and Gianluca Santoni

The purpose of this report is to survey the related literature and tentatively clarify the concepts of competitiveness, with a policy perspective. The work revises competitiveness debate from three main points of view: macroeconomic, regional and microeconomics.For Micro-economics, competitiveness usually relates to firm productivity; as well-established concept it is relatively easy to quantify empirically, bothat the firm and sectorallevel. On the other hand, Macro-economic definitions are generally less well-established and more controversial.

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Authors: Carlo Altomonte, Marco Antonielli, Michael Blanga-Gubbay and Silvia Carrieri

The Competitiveness Indicators Report surveys existing indicators in the economic literature, policy papers and databases, in order to provide a critical assessment and set up a selection of the indicators for the data mapping exercise (WP2).

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Authors: Davide Castellani, Silvia Cerisola, Giulia Felice, Emanuele Forlani and Veronica Lupi

This report provides a mapping of the available data for a list of key indicators of competitiveness at the sectoral, regional and aggregate level, derived from D3.1. For each indicator we have identified the relevant level of disaggregation (aggregate/country, sectoral and regional). Out of a total of 43 indicators, 41 can be computed at the aggregate level, 32 at the sectoral level and 16 at the regional level. Therefore, we have an overall number of 89 indicators for which we need to map data availability.

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Authors: Davide Castellani, Silvia Cerisola, Giulia Felice, Emanuele Forlani and Veronica Lupi

This report describes the computability and the availability of a set of competitiveness indicators calculated through a bottom-up approach, which consists in the computation of a competitiveness’ index by aggregating firm-level data for a specific group of firms. For example, aggregation can consist in the computation of averages (but also variances or other moments of the distribution) across all firms in a given sector (or region), or across subsets of firms (such as exporters or multinational firms). For each index, three levels of aggregation are considered: country, sector, and region. The mapping of micro-level databases includes information on firms’ industrial sector (usually NACE Rev. 1.1 or Rev. 2), and geographical location (usually NUTS2 region). The mapping allows users to know if a given competitiveness index is computable at sector, and/or regional level for each country.

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