Data Flows & Servicification

Here are my slides of a talk I gave at the WTO last week. The presentations sets out how data flows are economically important for the servicification of the economy / industries, and how the regulatory environment of data flows looks like today. Have a good read! 

Europe's Productivity Problem

There is a long-standing concern about Europe’s productivity performance, a long-term indicator for sustained economic growth. It is a measure that summarizes how effective we use our economic resources such as labour, capital and skills to create an efficient European economy.

Across the developed world, productivity is one of the most important economic catalysers because at some point economic growth through accumulating skills, capital or labour continue to naturally increase at a slower pace than before. From that moment onward, and hence in the long-run, economic growth comes down the ability to use all these factor in an efficient manner.

The concern with productivity is that aggregate productivity numbers describe a picture that is rather bleak. For over a long period of time now, the level of productivity has remained constant in the European Union (EU) as well as other OECD countries, and does not seem to be capable of showing any significant increase.

Using micro-level data of millions of firms in the EU, a recent report by the World Bank confirms this dim picture in the sense that there is very little movement of productivity over time. The figure below shows in blue the productivity developments in Europe’s manufacturing sector. After the global financial crisis (GFC), productivity went somewhat down and continued hovering around a constant level.