Abstract
Digitalization has been a constantly increasing driver of the standard of living worldwide, providing mechanisms through which quotidian activities are simplified, errors reduced, and development of nations accelerated. Therefore, people, businesses and governments became dependent on the good functionality of technological advances integrated in the system. In this framework, the performance of companies in the high-tech sector is vital to maintain and promote progress at country or region level. In the last decades, we have seen a complete transformation of the way the high-tech sector is perceived, especially considering how digitalization penetrates more developed countries versus less developed ones. In this respect, the current paper analyses the performance of knowledge-intensive companies in the services sector headquartered in the European Union, with relatively homogenous macroeconomic situation. Firstly, we investigated the performance of these knowledge-intensive services between 2011 and 2017 using productivity and profitability indicators, aiming at gaining insight into the behaviour of these services under normal economic conditions, and at revealing the relations between performance and location. We analyse the information extracted from the Eurostat database with a panel data approach, using an ordinary least squares (OLS) model, taking into consideration industry and country-specific variables. The results imply that industry factors are more prominent than geographical position as drivers of knowledge-intensive industries’ performance, but further research is needed to have more conclusive estimations. Secondly, we analysed the current pandemic, and the way social distancing is pushing towards finding fast and efficient solution to maintain communication, work in appropriate conditions and have easy access to any information necessary. From here, we discuss the implications of our previous findings for the knowledge-intensive services business performance in the years to come.
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Alexandra, H., Melisa, G., Lucian, B. (2022). High-Tech Industries Performance in the European Union. In: Dima, A.M., Kelemen, M. (eds) Digitalization and Big Data for Resilience and Economic Intelligence. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93286-2_1
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