The paper introduces a novel indicator of technological relatedness across firms. It considers both imported inputs and exported products to assess the similarity of firms in terms of their technological capabilities in Austria. The indicator captures technological similarity more closely than measures relying solely on exported products or overlapping industry classes. Descriptive results indicate that companies that are more closely related in the import-export product space also export and import more complex products. More complex products in turn are related to higher labor productivity levels. The impact of the proposed measure for bilateral corporate coherence on the production costs of firms is assessed by firm-level quadratic cost functions. The results indicate that bilateral coherence and related spillovers have a significant negative impact on the total cost of production of firms on average. The associated cost reduction effect follows a mildly U-shaped pattern. The paper also assesses the impact of bilateral coherence on the margins of trade at the firm level. The results indicate that firms with a higher bilateral coherence, and associated spillovers, have a positive impact on the diversification of both the export portfolio and imported inputs. The impacts on intensive margins and both import and export concentration are more ambiguous.

Industry contributed for about 20 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 in the EU. Cement, chemicals and steel industries are among the most energy-intensive industries. Around 26,522 million € of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) was used to support projects related to low-carbon industrial technologies (15 percent of the total ERDF in the period 2014-2020). 16 percent of the ERDF low-carbon project is associated with Research & Innovation (R&I) funding (4,255 million €). 13 percent of R&D project in low-carbon are transnational and interregional cooperation projects (549 million €) under the Interreg programme. Higher share of low-carbon projects over total ERDF is observed in central and eastern Europe. ERDF projects in the chemicals industry (407 million €) registered a substantially higher amount than those in cement (101 million €) or steel (89 million €) industries.

This paper examines structural change in global trade and its impact in the development of manufacturing shares across countries over time. It focuses on the dynamics of variety creation and destruction in exports and links the observed outcomes to the development of manufacturing shares across countries. The results show that while there is an inverse-U-shaped relationship with income per capita levels across countries of manufacturing shares, a specialisation in product lines with a high likelihood of displacing other exports and a high propensity to induce a clustering in the uptake of exports in related product lines is positively associated with manufacturing shares. Controlling for income levels more complex export portfolios are weakly associated with smaller manufacturing shares. These effects are mitigated when these parameters combine at the extreme ends of their values range.

Over the 2014-2020 financial period, 451 billion € of ESIF are invested in Cohesion policies, of which more than 40 billion € are dedicated directly to the thematic objective related to research and innovation. Among ESIF funds, ERDF is the main source of funding of Innovation through the implementation of smart specialisation strategies with a management shared between the Commission and the regional or national authorities. In this respect the monitoring and the evaluation of ESIF are implemented at regional or national level. At European Commission level, monitoring of cohesion policy is carried out mainly at operational programme (OP) level, meaning only very limited information is available at project and beneficiaries' level, also with partly low accuracy in terms of geographical information (OP can be national or in some cases multiregional). Reporting at project and beneficiary level is carried out through national or regional databases gathering information on beneficiaries (type of organisation, localisation, etc.) and details on funded projects (e.g., titles and abstracts and possibly other additional info depending the territory). Conversely to Horizon 2020 and due to the shared management, a complete structured database of ESIF projects does not exist. While information on ESIF beneficiaries and projects is recorded, this is held by individual regional or national managing authorities. Gathering this information on projects and beneficiaries in a single structured database would greatly benefit policy monitoring and evaluation, and the identification and creation of synergies with Horizon 2020 funding. This database would also feed ex-ante impact assessment analysis for the future multi-annual financial period (2021-2027), for the future cohesion policies and Horizon-Europe programme. The design of a structured and comprehensive database of projects funded by ERDF for the period 2014-2018 is based on the systematic collection of all information available at national and regional levels. The whole content of the database is translated to English (including project titles and abstracts) using European Commission Machine translation tool. The database offers also additional information such as keywords associated to each project in order to be able to bridge easily information contained in the ERDF projects database with, among others, Eye@RIS3 and the Horizon 2020 database. This report explains the origins of the information, the processing of collected information and the proxies used to obtain the most complete and comprehensive picture as possible of what has been supported through ERDF funding since 2014.

This paper examines how product relatedness and the breadth of technological search affect the path-dependent development of export specialisations across countries documented in prior research. The results of the econometric analysis in this paper show that broader technological search in an industry has a positive impact on the development of comparative advantages in the product lines it exports. The interplay between product relatedness and the scope of technological search has a two-edged character. On the one hand, broader technological search supports adjustments and consolidations of the export baskets on the extensive margin. This contributes to weaken path-dependency. On the other hand, it fosters the competitiveness of products that are related to current export specialisations, and thereby promotes path-dependency on the intensive margin of trade. These results differ across countries with different levels of technological capabilities.

This paper examines how product relatedness and the breadth of technological search affect the path-dependent development of export specialisations across countries documented in prior research. The results of the econometric analysis in this paper show that broader technological search in an industry has a positive impact on the development of comparative advantages in the product lines it exports. The interplay between product relatedness and the scope of technological search has a two-edged character. On the one hand, broader technological search supports adjustments and consolidations of the export baskets on the extensive margin. This contributes to weaken path-dependency. On the other hand, it fosters the competitiveness of products that are related to current export specialisations, and thereby promotes path-dependency on the intensive margin of trade. These results differ across countries with different levels of technological capabilities.

Macroeconomic imbalances in the EMU are at the heart of the current crisis. One explanation for the high current account deficits in the Southern European countries is that they lack a large, competitive and export-oriented industrial sector. The paper tests the hypothesis that parts of the structural change which happened in the EU before 2008 were supported by the divergent unit labour cost developments in the EMU. We look into patterns of structural change and sectoral competitiveness in all EU member countries and assess their linkages by means of a descriptive analysis as well as through econometric estimations. Our results broadly support the hypothesis. Industrial policy, which aims at fostering new competitive export-oriented industries in Southern Europe in order to reduce macroeconomic imbalances in the EMU, should thus be combined with adjustments in relative labour costs.

This paper examines whether PageRank algorithms are a valid instrument for the analysis of technical progress in specific technological fields by means of patent citation data. It provides evidence for patent data in biotechnology. Recent literature has been critical with regard to the use of PageRank for the analysis of scientific citation networks. The results reported in this paper indicate, however, that with some minor adaptations and careful interpretation of the results the algorithm can be used to capture some important stylised facts of technical progress and the importance of single patents relatively well especially if compared to indicators based on direct inward citations only.