Author Description

Since the mid 1990s, average growth rates of real GDP, labour productivity and total factor productivity in the EU have fallen behind US levels, whilst at the same time there is considerable diversity both in terms of growth performance as well as comparative levels between European countries. The main aim of this report is to show that these developments should be viewed from an industry perspective in terms of output, input and productivity performance, in order to examine to what extent variations across countries are largely due to industry structure. Aspects discussed include: industry structure and taxonomies, structural and cyclical performance, productivity performance at the company level, productivity-enhancing policies, data sources and methodology.