MapCompete Workshop “Non-Price competitiveness”
Paris 27-28 February 2014
During the MAPCOMPETE workshop “Non-Price Competitiveness” participants from academia
and research institutions discussed data issues related to creating new competitiveness
indicators (first session), the interplay between different datasets and the set of relevant
competitiveness indicators (second session) and best practices on data collection (third panel).
In the first session the speakers showed how they have employed competitiveness indicators
in recent studies at the frontier of the empirical research. Reinhilde Veugelers (KU Leuven and
Bruegel) talked about the EU-US R&D gap and the missing young innovative leaders in the
European economy. Florian Mayneris (Université catholique de Louvain) presented a new
methodology to identify high quality variety exporters in French firm-level data. Daniel Mirza
(University François Rabelais de Tours) presented on the competitiveness of Professional
Services v. Manufacturing firms using three properly-matched sets of firm-level data. Maria Bas
(SciencesPo) introduced a new indicator of competitiveness on quality based on MapCompete
deliverables. Hylke Vandenbussche (European Commission) presented a new methodology to
account for so-called veri-zontal differentiation in the theoretical and empirical literature using
firm-product-country data.
In the second session, the MapCompete teams presented on the achievements made within
the project so far, in particular in the areas of survey and selection of indicators (WP3), the data
mapping framework (WP2), and the matchability of different datasets (WP4). Marco Antonielli
presented for Bruegel, Davide Castellani for LdA and Andreas Koch for IAW.
Finally, in the third session Jorge Luis Rodriguez Mesa (WorldBank), Chiara Criscuolo (OECD),
Gerald Petit (European Commission, DG Entreprise), Frederic Boccara (INSEE) and Daniel Lewis
(ONS) have talked about the data collections that they are carrying out within their
organisations and highlighted the main difficulties. The following discussion focused on the
definition of the concept of “enterprise” and the identification of firm “boundaries”. Regarding
the first issue, the use of different (legal as well as economics) definitions of the basic entity
addressed in firm level data has important consequences for cross-country assessment of
competitiveness. A general agreement has been reached on the need for “plant” level data for
a better evaluation of firm performance. Regarding firm boundary issue, it has been discussed
from different perspectives. On one hand, many companies tend to have multiple decision
cores in terms of production while for financial decision, usually, there is only one decision
pole. Indeed, harmonised profiling procedures needs to be established in order to account for
the multiple decision levels. On the other hand, the increasing importance of global production
network has already motivated the Survey on "Global value chains", a European Project that
involves fourteen other countries, carried out since 2012.