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By exploiting cross-country micro-aggregated CompNet data, this study investigates the main implications of firm heterogeneity for international trade of EU countries, distinguishing between old and new Member States. On the one hand, exporting firms are larger, more productive and pay higher wages than non-exporting firms, especially in new EU economies. Only the former firms are indeed able to bear export costs, which are higher in new EU countries and are related to various factors, such as the quality of the legal system, the restrictiveness of labour-market regulation and the degree of access to finance. Hence, only few enterprises actually export, and the intensity of aggregate export concentration within few firms varies across countries and sectors. On the other hand, opening to trade boosts individual firms' productivity, via a number of channels (including GVC integration, which is particularly important for new EU countries), and also enhances allocative efficiency across firms, in turn increasing aggregate productivity growth. One of the main standard determinants of export growth, namely changes in the real effective exchange rate, impacts aggregate performance differently across countries and sectors, depending on sectoral composition and on firm characteristics, in both old and new Member States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first quantitative assessment of labour productivity dynamics in Italy's industrial sector between 1911 and 1951 and explores their links with changes in competition policy. It relies on a newly compiled dataset and provides fresh labour productivity estimates, disaggregated by industrial branch. Its main finding is that the switch to a more interventionist industrial policy enacted by the Fascist regime circa 1926–7 caused a marked slowdown in productivity growth. Nor was the government's decision to relocate resources from the traditional to the more modern industrial branches successful in lifting productivity dynamics: our shift-share analysis shows that the contribution of (static and dynamic) structural change from old to new industries to productivity growth was negligible. Finally, we find that the increase in the levels and growth rates of concentration, induced by specific Fascist policies, were associated with lower productivity levels and growth rates. This paper thus casts a shadow on the optimist accounts of Fascist industrial policy and confirms the findings of a revisionist literature minimising the positive role played by the State in the earlier stages of Italian industrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]