Abstracts
| Workshop of European Competitiveness: Abstracts |
| Monika Köppl-Turyna (EcoAustria) Investment Screening and Venture Capital (joint work with Vera Eichenauer and Stefan Köppl): |
| In this paper we analyze the effects of investment screening mechanisms on cross-border venture capital investments in Europe. The data we work with is originally based on PRISM data which has been extended by Eichenauer and Wang which we combine with deal data from Preqin to assess investment activity. Our results point to unintended negative effects: while the number of actually blocked deals has remained very low, the associated uncertainty and an increase in transaction costs have led to a significant decline in cross-border deals. The effects are stronger in the case of non-strategic investors and in the case of late-stage venture capital deals. This has profound policy implications for financing innovation in the European Union. |
| Philipp Koch (EcoAustria) Estimating digital product trade through corporate revenue data (joint work with Viktor Stojkoski, Eva Coll and César A. Hidalgo): |
| Despite global efforts to harmonize international trade statistics, our understanding of digital trade and its implications remains limited. Here, we introduce a method to estimate bilateral exports and imports for dozens of sectors starting from the corporate revenue data of large digital firms. This method allows us to provide estimates for digitally ordered and delivered trade involving digital goods (e.g. video games), productized services (e.g. digital advertising), and digital intermediation fees (e.g. hotel rental), which together we call digital products. We use these estimates to study five key aspects of digital trade. We find that, compared to trade in physical goods, digital product exports are more spatially concentrated, have been growing faster, and can offset trade balance estimates, like the United States trade deficit on physical goods. We also find that countries that have decoupled economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions tend to have larger digital exports and that digital exports contribute positively to the complexity of economies. This method, dataset, and findings provide a new lens to understand the impact of international trade in digital products. |
| Agnes Kügler (WIFO) |
| Michał Bernat (University of Warsaw) EU regulatory action to protect European competitiveness: Brussels effect and beyond (joint work with Francesco Spera): |
| Anu Bradford employed the term “Brussels effect” to discuss the European Union’s ability to shape regulations and standards in the global marketplace through the EU’s own unilateral regulatory action. That theory has been built around the notion that while the EU exercises its regulatory powers not to actively shape legislative frameworks outside its borders but mainly to establish and enforce standards for its own internal market, third country businesses, for various reasons, follow suit and, moreover, eventually the EU policies spill over to third countries themselves. However, several legislative developments and trends in recent years point to, beyond mere internal market regulation, the EU’s more activist approach and a more ambitious agenda to impose its own policies and rules on foreign companies or even indirectly on third countries. Therefore, it is argued that the so called “Brussels effect” extends more and more outside the EU, seeking to affect the behaviour of third country businesses, as well as the choices and policies of third countries, where the EU considers this necessary in order to also pursue the EU’s own global goals, such as protection of human rights, the management of climate change, combating the degradation of environment, mitigating the subsidisation of enterprises by states, or regulating AI. In that respect, a claim will be tested in the article which states that the internal regulation of the EU’s own market, once the primary goal of the EU regulatory agenda, has greatly decreased in importance or has even become secondary; it is now the promotion of European values, the protection of EU businesses (also against the competitive disadvantages they suffer due to the EU’s internal market rules) and the will to progress towards certain desired public effects at the global level that are mainly driving the most recent and most impactful EU regulations. |
| Kamil Zajaczkowski (University of Warsaw) The EU and global order in transition. Towards a turbulent and uncertain world |