期刊名称：Euro Area Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Statistics
印刷版ISSN：1830-3420
电子版ISSN：1830-3439
出版年度：2007
卷号：1
出版社：European Central Bank
摘要：What determines a country's ability to compete in international markets? What fosters the global competitiveness of its ¯rms? And in the European context, have key elements of the EU strategy such as EMU and enlargement helped or hindered domestic ¯rms' competitiveness in local and global markets? We address these questions by calibrating and simulating a conceptual framework that, based on Melitz and Ottaviano (2005), predicts that tougher and more transparent international competition drives less productive ¯rms out the market, thereby increasing average productivity as well as reducing average prices and mark-ups. The model also predicts a parallel reduction of price dispersion within sectors. Our conceptual framework allows us to disentangle the e®ects of technology and freeness of entry from those of accessibility (i.e. the ease for local ¯rms to reach local and foreign consumers). On the one hand, by controlling for the impact of trade frictions, we are able to construct an index of `revealed competitiveness', which would drive the relative performance of countries in an ideal world in which all faced the same barriers to international transactions. On the other hand, by focusing on the role of accessibility while keeping `revealed competitiveness' as given, we are able to evaluate the impacts of EMU and enlargement on the competitiveness of European ¯rms. We ¯nd that EMU positively a®ects the competitiveness of ¯rms located in participating economies. Enlargement has, instead, two contrasting e®ects. It improves the accessibility of EU members but it also increases substantially the relative importance of unproductive competitors from Eastern Europe.
关键词：European integration; gains from trade; competitiveness; ¯rm-level data;total factor productivity
