IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-21-00711.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Competition, technological change and productivity gains: a European sectoral analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Stéphane Ciriani

    (Orange France)

  • François Jeanjean

    (Orange France)

Abstract

We show that the relationship between the level of competition (the price markup) and the growth of labor productivity in 28 sectors of a panel of 8 euro area countries between 1995 and 2018 is consistent with an inverted U-shaped curve. We calculate an optimal price markup that maximizes productivity growth in each sector and show that sectors with the highest rates of technical progress are the ones that maximize their growth of productivity at the lowest levels of competition (the higher price markup). For the European panel of sectors, during this period, the average loss in productivity growth attributable to deviations from their optimal levels of competition was 0.31%. From a policy perspective, public authorities should aim to enable optimal price markups, particularly in high-innovation sectors, to reap the most benefits from their potential for productivity.

Suggested Citation

  • Stéphane Ciriani & François Jeanjean, 2022. "Competition, technological change and productivity gains: a European sectoral analysis," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 42(2), pages 927-946.
  • Handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-21-00711
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2022/Volume42/EB-22-V42-I2-P79.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    technical Progress; productivity growth; markup;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O3 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights
    • O4 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-21-00711. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: John P. Conley (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.