Abstract:

As the current financial crisis has shown, the economic instability and the high degree of uncertainty have seriously affected the European countries performances in terms of economic growth and competitiveness. In general, the E.U. countries distinguished themselves by the way they coped with the economic shocks. Based on these grounds, we decided to direct our research of this paper towards a comparative analysis of the macroeconomic performances of the E.U. countries in order to highlight the most relevant competitiveness differences, by taking into consideration the following macroeconomic indicators: GDP growth rate, current account balance, foreign direct investments, public deficit, labour productivity and the unemployment rate. Although we are aware that studying the differences on competitiveness, growth and sustainability in the European economies and building effective economic growth models can be considered quite difficult, we decided to accept the challenge to model the robust dependencies between economic growth and competitiveness. Therefore we estimated a panel data model for the 28 E.U. countries for the period 2008- 2013 using robust fixed-effects regression. The main findings were consistent to the economic theory and highlighted that the main stimulating factor upon economic growth is labour productivity.