Competitiveness and productivity: a case study of Italian firms

The purpose of this article is to obtain a synthetic measure of the multi-dimensional concept of firm competitiveness and to analyse the role of different factors, such as productivity, firm size and cluster of industries, for determining firm competitiveness in Italy. An adequate firm-specific data set is constructed from balance sheets by using imputation methods for handling missing values. The synthetic measure of competitiveness is obtained using a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach, then a Tobit model is considered to measure the influence of different factors on the measured competitiveness. The results obtained are very interesting and coherent with the characteristics of the Italian firms.