EU External Competitiveness: recent developments
Résumé
In a previous report prepared on the basis of data up to 2005, Europe an Union external competitiveness was shown to be resilient to the emergence of new competitors.
The explanations for this rather good performance by Europe an industry were the fact that the EU has managed to exploit its advantage in top quality (and to a lesser extent technological) products; and that it has exploited the diversity of its comparative advantage based on low cost producing locations and excellent laboratories in several domains
The purpose of the present report is to revisit these issues using more recent data , to take account of new developments in the analysis of Global Value Chains (GVC), and generally to takes of the dramatic macroeconomic counter-performances in Europe since 2008. Our current conclusions differ from those in the previous report