ECOtwins Second Annual Meeting
26/07/2024
The UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change at ESCI-UPF participated in the second annual meeting of the ECOtwins project, held at the University of Copenhagen on July 18th and 19th.
As it is well known, the relationship between a country’s production costs and export success is not clear-cut since there are two offsetting factors at play (see here for a good reference). On the one hand, globalisation and the intensification in competition suggests that exports should become more sensitive to costs, enabling the enterprises and countries that manage to export more cheaply to acquire a larger market share. On the other hand, product competition is increasingly focused around quality, variety, sophistication and technological/innovative content. From that perspective, price or cost competitiveness does not necessarily yield better results for exporters.
Having analysed data broken down by product category for the eurozone top six exporters, in a recent paper we show that a decrease in production costs is not the only factor relevant to stimulating exports. In particular, our findings suggest that cost competitiveness (measured using unit labour costs or ULCs) alone does not explain export success (measured as a given country’s share of world OECD exports). This idea is consistent with the first paper mentioned above as well as with a more recent study that focuses on quantifying the importance of price adjustments in explaining the trend in Spanish exports. In this study the authors find that the elasticity of Spanish exports to foreign demand is higher than their price elasticity.
All this suggests that there are other factors beyond cutting costs -such as the firm’s innovation activity, R&D intensity, or its ability to identify and satisfy foreign demand- which may also be significant to driving growth in manufacturing exports. From that standpoint, the argument can be made that it is important to move beyond the internal devaluation practices adopted to tackle the crisis towards new measures aimed at recapitalising the economy (be it Catalan, Spanish or EU) in all its facets including physical capital, technological capital and, above all, human capital.
26/07/2024
The UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change at ESCI-UPF participated in the second annual meeting of the ECOtwins project, held at the University of Copenhagen on July 18th and 19th.
22/07/2024
Cristina Campos, investigadora de la Cátedra UNESCO de Ciclo de Vida y Cambio Climático de ESCI-UPF, ha participado en los cursos de verano de la Universidad de Cantabria (UC) en una ponencia en la que abordó el turismo rural desde una perspectiva ambiental y presentó el proyecto GREENTOUR.
13/06/2024
The UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change at ESCI-UPF joins forces with the Catalan Institute of Health and ISGlobal on the CATALYSE Project to help mitigate the effects of climate change at the Catalan Health System.
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