EU publications

Store-based retail market openness

Measuring cross-border operations and investment : final report

Publication metadata

This report demonstrates that the EU Member States vary with regard to store-based retail market integration (openness), measured in terms of economic contribution of foreign retailers to local retailing markets. While a high degree of integration, i.e. large presence and economic impact of foreign-controlled retailers, is observed in the Member States that joined the EU after 2004, old EU Member States are mostly characterized by low levels of retail market integration. Moreover, as the analysis of outward flow of investments suggest the integration of the retail sector in the EU is mostly... driven by the largest countries of EU15, such as Germany, France, the UK, and less so by Italy and Spain. Apart from differences between the countries, there are also crucial differences within the countries considering the performance of foreign and domestic retailers. Foreign-controlled retailers are not only larger than their domestic counterparts (in terms of turnover and number of persons employed per enterprise), but also turn out to be more productive (in terms of turnover and value added per person employed). Lastly, this report illustrates that there exists only a weak (negative) correlation between the retail establishment restrictiveness and the degree of retail integration. Nonetheless, due to data limitation and non-experimental design, this result should be interpreted tentatively.