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Reforms and Investments

Micro-data platform for productivity

Supporting reforms to foster an attractive business environment and increase competitiveness

Funding Programme
Year
  • 2023

Micro-data platform for productivity

Higher labour productivity growth is a key factor in raising living standards in advanced economies. However, labour productivity growth in Europe has for long been low. Aggregate labour productivity in major Member States, as well as for the EU aggregate, is lagging that of frontier countries, in particular the US. The problem is persistent in Austria and in all of the 6 Member States (France, Germany, Latvia, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia) which previously launched a multicountry project on the matter. Access to large amounts of micro-data is a prerequisite to design effective policies in order to foster stronger productivity growth.

Context

More recently, rapid advances in computing power have allowed for the processing of large amounts of micro-data, which has enabled economists and analysts to conduct more granular investigations (e.g. by geographical unit, firm size, industry). 

These investigations, using micro-data, are crucial to understand the causal drivers of the slowdown in productivity growth and to evaluate the causal effect of policies on productivity growth at the firm level. Due to substantial heterogeneity across firms, understanding these firm-level mechanisms is a necessary prerequisite to design effective policies to foster stronger productivity growth. The quality of these analyses and policy evaluation based on these analyses would be substantially improved if comparable cross-country micro-data were available, which is not yet the case.

Support delivered

  1. The development of the micro-data infrastructure with remote execution / access and featuring the following characteristics.
  2. The training of the National Productivity Boards’ staff / national ministries to ensure that they can fully exploit the potential of the micro-data infrastructure.

Results achieved

The project helped set up the infrastructure for the development of the micro-data infrastructure in Austria which was mostly completed by the end of the project. Hence, it provided the foundation for building a secure and harmonized platform for cross-border analytical work. The project also delivered dedicated training on the micro-data infrastructure and its tools. Based on the micro-data infrastructure, the project fostered a research project on firms’ energy transition. 

Looking forward, the availability of cross-country comparable firm level data will help the economic national institutions, such as National Productivity Boards to sharpen their policy analyses and support the 6 Member States in evaluating the best policy choices to implement the reforms agreed as part of their Recovery and Resilience Plans (RRP).

More about the project

You can read the documents related to the project here: