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MICRO-DYN focuses on growth, employment and competitiveness in the knowledge-based economy through a micro-founded firm-based approach. The analysis moves from the micro-entities of economic actions and strategies at the enterprise level to sectoral, regional, national and European levels.

MICRO-DYN focuses on growth, employment and competitiveness in the knowledge-based economy through a micro-founded firm-based approach. The analysis moves from the micro-entities of economic actions and strategies at the enterprise level to sectoral, regional, national and European levels. From a policy perspective, the impact of corporate, industrial and regional strategies at national and European levels can be understood only through the changes they induce in individual firm behaviour. Cross-country firm-level evidence shapes the research undertaken. The analysis uses datasets across European regions and industries, exploiting individual data on firms and allowing for firm heterogeneity. These models are aggregated at sectoral, regional and national levels to recover the behaviour of aggregate variables. Micro-foundations highlight the role of microeconomic and policy parameters whose changes determine the reallocation of resources within and across sectors, regions and countries.

Within MICRO-DYN, FEEM leads WP5 "Internationalisation of corporate activity and competitiveness of the European economy", whose objective is to examine the role of internationalization through different organizational forms for enterprise performance, knowledge spillovers and catching-up processes. First, FEEM laid down the ground to prepare comparable cross-country studies. Based on inputs provided by the partners, a literature survey was circulated, a set of guidelines for the country papers was prepared, and common research questions and methodologies where identified. First preliminary versions of country papers were presented at the 1st Workshop held in Vienna on 12-14 April 2007. The revised country papers formed the basis for the Final Report of the cross-country exercise produced by FEEM in May 2008. The Final Report incorporates the common cross-country comparison of the international activities of firms, and links all the new research paths identified by the country papers. It aims at developing a theoretical and empirical framework capable to assess the heterogeneity of firms within industries and, by aggregating firm-level information, to recover the behaviour of industry-level variables to incorporate strategic issues formulated at different levels (firm, industry and country) of policy-making. WP5 has now started to explore some of the research questions emerging from the analysis carried out so far.