There is growing demand from academia and policymakers for cross-country comparable firm data. CompNet aims to provide such data and to improve understanding of the drivers of competitiveness. Among the findings in the latest cross-country report are that healthy firms are more likely to be credit constrained in the presence of a high share of distressed firms; that the disconnection between real wages and productivity growth in the post-crisis period has been rather heterogeneous across EU firms; and that exporting firms are more productive, larger, pay higher wages, and employ more qualified personnel.
Filippo di Mauro, Paloma Lopez-Garcia, Marta Colombo, 11 February 2019
Filippo di Mauro, 11 March 2014
Policies aimed at enhancing firm productivity may greatly benefit from firm-level evidence. Unfortunately, micro-founded data, particularly of cross-country nature, remain largely unavailable. This column presents a new firm-level database built by a research network of the EU system of central banks (CompNet). This data base allows investigating how firm size and labour costs interact at different levels of productivity. This new cross-country data base, and its potential to expand, could be of great policy value.