Austria’s Competitiveness and its Determinants. Concepts, Developments, Relative Performance and Policy Options

Austria’s rather poor development in international competitiveness rankings gave rise to questions about the economic concept of competitiveness and about the determinants and policies that can make an economy thrive again. The three modules of this research project aim at finding answers to these questions. They analyze labor costs, labor productivity, total factor productivity (TFP) and economic potential using a wide range of methods including shift-share analysis, panel econometrics, Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the Anniversary Fund (“Jubiläumsfonds”) of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB).