The Industrial Organisation and New Technologies Department looks at:
In the department of Industrial Organisation and New Technologies, current economic activity is examined at a disaggregated level and the structure and development of individual industries is examined. The instruments used include the Ifo Business Survey and the Ifo Investment Survey. The Ifo Business Survey is broken down into more than one hundred individual industries and offers an industry overview that is unparalleled in Europe in terms of its detail and up-to-date data.
The examination of industry-sector-specific opportunities and risks is one of the traditional tasks of the Ifo Institute. The globalisation of markets and enterprises, the tertiarisation of the economy, technological trends and paradigm changes and the formation of new growth centres in the world economy bring about changes in economic structures. These changes give rise to the question about the necessary measures for safeguarding competitiveness. As part of a European consortium (Ifo Institute, Cambridge Econometrics, Danish Technological Institute, ECORYS Netherlands BV, IDEA Consult) competition studies have been conducted for important European industries for the EU Commission. For these studies methods have been devised for a standardised competition analysis at the European level. An advantage of this approach is that the competitiveness of industries in individual countries, for example Germany, can be evaluated from a broader instead of only a national perspective.
The practical experience of the Ifo industry experts has proved to be indispensable for this research-supported service. For the deepening of the dialogue with businesses and federations, two annual conferences are organised: the CESifo International Spring Conference and the Ifo Industry Colloquium) with more than 100 representatives from the business world. Approx. 30 European industries are presented at the Ifo Industry Colloquium, with an emphasis on manufacturing but also on the service sector.
In addition, medium- and long-term structural developments will be increasingly analysed with the empirical methods of industrial economics and will become one of the main activities of the department.
New technologies have a cross-sectional function in the department with interfaces to other Ifo departments: On the one hand, the department examines the development of technology-intensive industries, such as for example the telecommunications industry or hardware and software industries. Of particular interest are the frequently asymmetric market structures in technology-intensive markets, which also pose as a challenge for competition policy. On the other hand, new technologies influence other industries. The stepped-up employment of information and communications technologies (ICT) can lead to transformations in industries that rely on ICT. The department of Industrial Organisation and New Technologies thus co-operates closely with the department of Human Capital and Innovation in order to utilise complementary competencies in the area of technology development (innovation) and technology use (diffusion). In addition, the department co-operates closely with the Munich-based Bauhaus Luftfahrt in order to continuously analyse developments in the aviation industry.
The new research orientation of the department is also expressed in the amplified use of micro data at the enterprise level. Corporate decisions that are captured by the Ifo Investment Survey or the Ifo innovation Survey provide valuable insights into the competitiveness of individual enterprises and aggregated sectors in an international comparison. Modern microeconomic methods and the precise identification of causal mechanisms determined by natural experiments or panel data stand in the foreground of the department’s enterprise research. Of particular interest are also the effects of economic and technology policies on enterprise decisions. The collecting and evaluation of enterprise data is carried out in close co-operation with the department of Business Cycle Analyses and Surveys. Depending on the industries examined, there is also co-operation with the departments of International Trade and the department of Energy, Environment and Exhaustible Resources.
Building on the statistical data compiled by the Ifo Business Survey and the Ifo Investment Survey as well as on the on-going, detailed quantitative and qualitative industry analyses, the department writes several hundred semi-annual reports for a client in the banking sector. This project, which has been continuously financed since 1993, supplies important, detailed information to department as well as other Ifo researchers on industry developments and outlook. In future, they will increasingly take into consideration the internationalisation of markets and enterprises as well as technological change.
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