State Aid and Export Competitiveness in the EU

Despite the proclaimed return of industrial policy state aid provided by EU Member States is at historically low levels. This fact is at least partly explained by the unique institutional arrangement in the EU which empowers the European Commission to monitor and restrict state aid activities of Member States. Making use of European state aid statistics over the period 1995–2011 we construct a measure for manufacturing state aid and estimate an expanded macro-economic export function to investigate the relationship between state aid for the manufacturing sector and Member States’ export performance. Since national governments can be expected to provide subsidies primarily to foster domestic value added we use value added exports as the export performance measure. Non-stationarity of the data confines us to investigating the short run relationships in which we only find limited evidence for a significant impact of state aid on manufacturing value added exports.