Business services and the export performances of manufacturing industries

This paper investigates the contribution provided by the Business service sector (BS) to the international competitiveness of manufacturing industries that acquire and use intangible intermediate inputs (in particular, those provided by two main BS sub-sectors: “Communication and computer related services” and “Other business activities”). The main empirical focus of this paper is on the “dynamic efficiency gains” brought about by the interaction of manufacturing and BS industries and, in particular, on assessing the role of BS in supporting (in a Schumpeterian fashion) various types of non-price competitive factors, the most important being the capacity of developing and introducing new products, more effective organizational innovations and new business models. The empirical analysis is based on an original data set obtained by integrating – for a selected number of EU countries - different industry level data sources, namely the OECD Input-output Tables, the OECD Structural Analysis Database and data provided by the Community Innovation Survey. The results of the empirical analysis show that BS do exert a positive impact on the international competitiveness of manufacturing industries, even though these effects vary according to the type of intermediate intangible input acquired and type of user sector.