Real and financial aspects of euro area competitiveness Starting by an assessment of the competitiveness of euro area firms and thus their capacity to play a leading role in world markets, losses in world export market shares over the last decade point to increasing challenges for the euro area.
While being partly an adjustment to the emergence of new competitors, and most notably China and India, with lower labour costs, this may in principle also reflect losses in price competitiveness against other advanced competitors or a more unfavourable export specialisation. Nevertheless, it is important to note that most other advanced competitors have also experienced export market share losses over the same period.