The impact of Service Sector Innovation and Internationalisation on Growth and Productivity (SERVICEGAP)

The SERVICEGAP project will consider the academic and policy concerns that arise from the increasing importance of the service sector. It will do so through examining developments in productivity and its drivers within market services, linkages between services and other sectors, technological change in types and delivery of services and international connections. WIFO is responsible for the linkages between the manufacturing and the service sector in the EU 27 countries. In particular, we aim to investigate the effect of knowledge-intensive service inputs on productivity and manufacturing exports at the industry level. Furthermore, we investigate whether or not the effect differs across manufacturing industries (e.g., technology- and skill-intensive vs. other industries). In the project, analysis about the effect of intersectoral linkages on manufacturing exports and MFP will be extended accounting for a comparison between countries and the ICT intensity of services. While the general pattern of the linkages between manufacturing and services has been the subject of some research, there is to date no comprehensive comparative analysis at the level of both different industries and different countries. The task will combine existing data sets available for the EU and USA, a number of them resulting from previous research funded by the EU.