1 - Introduction

Summary

Productivity diverges widely and persistently between – and most notably within – countries and industries. Connecting the micro and macro perspective is also a challenge productivity research has to face. To tackle such issues, since the early 2010s the Competitiveness Research Network – CompNet – a large European initiative, was created with two main objectives: (i) developing a forum for discussion on productivity research; and (ii) setting up a truly comparable EU dataset of productivity indicators, based on firm-level information of top quality. We will extensively use the research work and the dataset generated by CompNet in this book. Our ultimate objective is to show how we can gather rich and critical information by taking a firm-level perspective, but also argue that despite the progress made, additional EU-wide efforts need to be made on the data front to ensure suffcient depth and accurateness.