Competitiveness of the European Food Industry : an economic and legal assessment 2007

Abstract

The competitiveness of the European food industry is weak compared to the US and Canada and at approximately the same level as the Australian and Brazilian industry. Scenarios show that unless the productivity growth in the EU is higher than in the rest of the world, EU competitiveness remains weak. Despite the weak competitive performance, a fair number of world leading food enterprises are located in the EU. Moreover the importance of the food industry in total manufacturing is growing, and the sub-sectors value added is higher than that of most other sub-sectors in manufacturing. The impact of food legislation does not seem to affect EU competitiveness negatively compared to the US. In general, EU companies’ view on the food legislation is positive. EU authorities can increase their support for the European industry by engaging in export negotiations. This study is one of the few or maybe even the first one, which included all subsectors of the food industry and benchmarked these with important non-EU countries.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 111 citations exist upstream.