Productivity Gains from Services Liberalization in Europe

Jan Bena, Peter Ondko and Evangelia Vourvachaki ()

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: As part of the Single Market Program the European Commission commanded the liberalization and regulatory harmonization of utilities, transport and telecommunication services. This paper investigates whether and how this process affected the productivity of European network firms. Exploiting the variation in the timing and degree of liberalization efforts across countries and industries, we find that liberalization increased firm-level productivity but had no reallocation impact. Based on our estimates, the average firm-level productivity gain from liberalization amounts to 38 percent of the average total within-firm productivity gain in network industries. The results underscore the growth-promoting role of liberalization efforts.

Keywords: productivity; liberalization; allocative efficiency; services; firm-level data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 K23 L11 L51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eec, nep-eff, nep-eur and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp452.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Productivity Gains from Services Liberalization in Europe (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cer:papers:wp452

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Vasiljevova ().