Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. All rights reserved. Terms of use: Documents in ISSN 1725-2806 (online) EU Catalogue NoQB-AR-13-053-EN-N (online)Any reproduction, publication and reprint in the form of a different publication, whether printed or produced electronically, in whole or in part, is permitted only with the explicit written authorisation of the ECB or the authors. The refereeing process of this paper has been coordinated by Editorial Board of the ECB Working Paper Series, led by Philipp Hartmann.The paper is released in order to make the research of CompNet generally available, in preliminary form, to encourage comments and suggestions prior to final publication. The views expressed in the paper are the ones of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the ECB, the ESCB, and of other organisations associated with the Network. AcknowledgementsThe views presented in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the ECB. We thank Gilles Noblet (ECB), Jason Jones (Furman University) and the discussants at the joint CES-Ifo /University of Athens workshop on 23-24 September 2011 for helpful comments. We are particularly grateful to Alessio Terzi for valuable research assistance. Stefan HuemerEuropean Central Bank; e-mail: stefan.huemer@ecb.europa.eu Beatrice ScheubelEuropean Central Bank; e-mail: beatrice.scheubel@ecb.europa.eu Florian WalchEuropean Central Bank; e-mail: florian.walch@ecb.europa.eu 1 ABSTRACTWhile there are many methods to measure the competitiveness of an economy, most of these concepts ignore the fact that competitiveness can change because of market processes like wage negotiation but also because of political decision-making. Governments that compete with others for factors of production face the incentive to adjust key policy variables to improve their competitive position. Disentangling market-induced and politics-induced changes in competitiveness is not easy, but strongly warranted given current discussions that some EMU Member States should improve their competitive position within the euro area by adjusting policy variables. Increasing country competitiveness is one of the key objectives currently discussed by policy makers in the context of creating an economic union in the euro area, to complement monetary union. We propose a new competitiveness index that captures the dimensions in which politics can influence competitiveness beyond factor price adjustments.Our index shows that the individual components of i...

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