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Austria Efforts to Improve Competitiveness
Like many other countries that had concentrated on industrial
production and where industrial value added constituted an
important element of national production as well as of national
exports, Austria had to reevaluate its performance during the
1980s. The government commissioned a special report on the need
for structural adjustment, and a number of steps were taken to
make Austria more competitive worldwide.
Steps to increase competitiveness include privatization,
greater incentives for research, and greater readiness to make
decisions about curtailing subsidies where they are not warranted
(especially for nationalized industries) and could drain
resources from other potentially more competitive industries.
Although industrial subsidies are harder to calculate than
agricultural subsidies because of their greater range (from
direct payments to accelerated depreciation allowances and the
like), the government during the 1980s made special efforts to
reduce those subsidies and encourage competitiveness. Some of
these measures appear to have been at least in part effective,
although they were not always carried out as fast as originally
planned.
Data as of December 1993
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