评估欧盟27国的商业环境：概述

Assessing the Business Environment in the EU-27:An Overview* David C. Francis and Filip JolevskiT his Brief is the first in a series of several companion pieces that assess the state of the businessenvironment in 27 European Union (EU27) countries. This series makes use of a fully comparabledata source—the World Bank Enterprise Surveys—that measures firms’ experiences with andopinions on a variety of obstacles, constraints, enabling policies, and other aspects that comprise thebusiness environment. This Brief opens the series by presenting the data and topics that will be exploredmore in depth by subsequent Briefs. To guide this process, in particular, an assessment is given of firms’expression of their top obstacles. Two such obstacles stand out, overwhelmingly. In 99 of 186 NUTS2-levelgroupings, an ‘inadequately educated workforce’ is cited most frequently as the top obstacle, while in 51such regions ‘tax rates’ is the most often-cited top obstacle. As it turns out, the regions that cite thesedifferent obstacles more frequently vary in notable ways: those citing the workforce-related obstacle aremuch more likely to be higher-income and have more technologically advanced sectoral profiles. The regionsciting tax rates as a top obstacle, by contrast, tend to be lower income and contain lower-technology sectors;they also tend to be located in the periphery of the EU27. Yet while these commonalities across sub-nationalregions are important, country-level aspects remain important: most regions are more similar to otherregions in their country, as opposed to regions with similar characteristics but located elsewhere.Public Disclosure Authorized Regional convergence remains an importantpriority across the EU27 areaPublic Disclosure Authorized Put more plainly, the largest income-level disparities inthe EU27 are between the area’s sub-national regions,not necessarily between the countries themselves.These disparities have motivated a policy agenda Despite the overall level of income in the area ofthe 27 European Union states (EU27), there still existlarge disparities in economic development. These largegaps are particularly notable at the sub-national level,and in fact, the disparities between the lowest-incomeareas in the EU27 and the highest may be partiallymasked by country-level differences (Kilroy and Ganau,2022). For instance, the NUTS2 regions with thehighest income levels in 2019 (that is, the ones at the90thpercentile or above) had an income that was 2.7times that of the poorest regions (those at the 10thpercentile or below), according to GDP per inhabitantafter adjusting for local prices (authors’ calculationsbased on Eurostat data). The same ratio is only 2.4times at the country level, that is comparing thehighest-income countries in the EU27 to the lowest.Public Disclosure Authorized focused on the promotion of regional convergence inthe EU27. In particular, the European Union hasmaintained a series of targeted funds with the mandateof making transfers to poorer regions within the region;while such programs have had some level of success infostering growth among those regions, the realization ofconvergence-basedpolicyobjectiveshasnotbeenuniform(Becker,Egger,andvonEhrlich,2010).Laggard regions remain (Kilroy and Ganau, 2022), andthoughtherehavebeenmarkedachievementsinfostering economic convergence in the EU27, thereisevidencethatthepaceofthisconvergenceisslowing (Butkus et al., 2018). In the aftermath of a,presumably, ebbing global pandemic—in addition tothe slowed-down global economy (Potential Growth distinguishable from zero. It does appear that therelationship between income levels a decade ago (i.e., asof 2011) and growth throughout the pandemic isnon-linear:thegreatestcontractionsinGDPperinhabitant occurred among the sub-national NUTS2regions with middle income levels. In fact, if theNUTS2 areas are grouped into quartiles based on their2011 income level, the middle two quartiles (that isthose in the inter-quartile range), contracted at anaveragerateof5.5%in2020and2021.Thelowest-income areas (those in the first quartile) onlycontracted by 3.5% per annum and the highest-incomeareascontractedby4%.Thatis,theCOVID-19pandemic, interacting with underlying elements of thebusiness environment hurt convergence by slowingexactly those middle-income NUTS2 areas that wereon a path to approach higher-income ones. Prospects: Risks, Rewards, and Policies, World Bank,2023)—understandingthedynamicsunderlyingcontinued convergence will be all the more important(WorldBank,2023).Fromapolicyperspective,identifyingandaddressingthefactorsunderlyingregional disparities will not only be in the benefit ofthese laggard regions, but for the EU27 as a whole, asregion-based constraints may affect the allocation ofkey resources and labor, which may hold back thegrowth of all regions (Heise and Porzio, 2022).Indeed, there is some evidence that the period preceding the onset of the global pandemic was one ofconvergence acr