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This paper provides a new cross-country evaluation of competitiveness, focusing on the linkages between productivity and export performance among European economies. We use the information compiled in the Trade module of CompNet to establish new stylized facts regarding the joint distributions of the firm-level exports performance and productivity in a panel of 15 countries, 23 manufacturing sectors during the 2000’s. We confirm that exporters are more productive than non-exporters. However, this productivity premium is rising with the export experience of firms, with permanent exporters being much more productive than starters. At the intensive margin, we show that both the level and the growth of firm-level exports rise with firm productivity, and that the bulk of aggregate exports in each country are made by a small number of highly productive firms. Finally, we show that during the crisis, the growth of exports by high productive firms sustained the current account adjustment of European “stressed” economies. This last result confirms that the shape of the productivity distribution within each country can have important consequences from the point of view of the dynamics of aggregate trade patterns.

Drawing from confidential firm-level balance sheets in 11 European countries, the paper presents a novel sectoral database of comparable productivity indicators built by members of the Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet) using a newly developed research infrastructure. Beyond aggregate information available from industry statistics of Eurostat or EU KLEMS, the paper provides information on the distribution of firms across several dimensions related to competitiveness, e.g. productivity and size. The database comprises so far 11 countries, with information for 58 sectors over the period 1995-2011. The paper documents the development of the new research infrastructure, describes the database, and shows some preliminary results. Among them, it shows that there is large heterogeneity in terms of firm productivity or size within narrowly defined industries in all countries. Productivity, and above all, size distribution are very skewed across countries, with a thick left-tail of low productive firms. Moreover, firms at both ends of the distribution show very different dynamics in terms of productivity and unit labour costs. Within-sector heterogeneity and productivity dispersion are positively correlated to aggregate productivity given the possibility of reallocating resources from less to more productive firms. To this extent, we show how allocative efficiency varies across countries, and more interestingly, over different periods of time. Finally, we apply the new database to illustrate the importance of productivity dispersion to explain aggregate trade results.

The paper combines the literature on financial crises in emerging markets and developing economies with that on international migrations by investigating whether the increasingly large flows of workers’ remittances can help reduce the probability of current account reversals. The rationale for this stands in the great stability and low cyclicality of remittances as compared to other private capital flows: these properties, combined with the fact that remittances are cheap inflows of foreign currencies, might reduce the probability that foreign investors suddenly flee out of emerging markets and developing economies and trigger a dramatic current account adjustment. We find that remittances can indeed have such a beneficial effect. In particular, we show that a high level of remittances, as a ratio of GDP, makes the relationship between a decreasing stock of international reserves (over GDP) and a higher probability of current account crises less stringent. The same occurs, though less neatly, for the positive relationship between an increasing stock of external debt (over GDP) and the probability of current account reversals. Our results point also to a threshold effect of remittances: the mechanisms just described are, in fact, much stronger when remittances are above 3 percent of GDP.