Analysis of the Import Activity of European Firms

The growing internationalisation of the world economy in recent decades has placed firms under strong competitive pressures, but has also handed them new opportunities to improve their productivity by exploiting, for example, the cost advantages and technological progress available to those which import intermediate goods and services for use in their production. Despite the strong development of this type of imports in world trade and the differences in import dependency across countries with a similar level of development, few studies have analysed the factors that determine whether a firm will import. In this respect, the EFIGE database (which contains European firm data obtained through a survey conducted in 2008), enables not only the factors that make it more likely that a firm will import intermediate inputs for its production to be analysed, but also, since it has been implemented homogeneously across the four large euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain), the source of the differences between them to be investigated.