E-commerce trends and impacts across Europe

This study investigates the patterns and trends of e-commerce activities as well as their impact on labour productivity growth in a group of European countries. At hand for the exercise is a unique panel of micro-aggregated firm-level data for 14 European countries spanning over the years 2002 to 2010. The empirical approach is twofold: A static specification and a dynamic panel data model. The former is a difference specification estimated by OLS and the latter uses system GMM to account for endogeneity of e-commerce activities. For the impact analysis e-commerce is narrowed down to e-sales, measured as the percentage of firms receiving orders online (EDI or websites) or as the share of total sales in firms. Descriptive statistics reveal that the proportion of firms engaging in e-sales activities is slowly growing over time starting from a low level. The OLS estimates, controlling for industry, time and country effects, show that the change in e-sales activities and labour productivity growth are significantly positively related. Specifically, an increase in e-sales raises the rate of labour productivity by 0.3 percentage points over a two-year period for the total sample. Services industries experience a larger impact than manufacturing. In addition, dynamic panel data estimates demonstrate that smaller firms gain the most from increases in e-sales. Overall, for the total business sector, these estimates reveal that the increase in e-sales activities during the period studied accounts for 17 per cent of the total growth in labour productivity.