Description:
The present paper aims at analyzing the sources of productivity in Europe to
account for its recent underperformance and identify potential geographic
idiosyncracies. We study the productivity performance and its sources in a
sample of ten European regions belonging to four countries (France,
Germany, Italy and Spain). Exploiting the increasing availability of
disaggregated data at regional level in Europe, we propose both a
descriptive statistics and an econometric analysis of productivity sources
since 1995. Our main finding is that the sources of labor productivity are
rather heterogeneous across our sample but may be associated with regional
or national idiosyncracies.