Highly competitive companies contribute 53.8% of GDP, but their weight has decreased by 4.4 percentage points since 2014, when they generated 58.2% of the added value of the Valencian economy. The same occurs in the case of employment, since while in 2014 the most competitive companies generated 48.4% of private sector work, in 2021, this contribution is reduced by 5.4 percentage points, to 43.8%.
The report from the Observatory on Corporate Government, Strategy and Competitiveness (GECE), prepared by the Ivie and CaixaBank, leaves a bitter taste, because it maintains that the efforts to improve competitiveness have not been sufficient. And the percentage of highly competitive Valencian companies has grown 0.4 percentage points in the last decade, reaching 23.7%, but they do not manage to exceed the national average, which is 25%.
With regard to employment, despite the drop in the weight of highly competitive companies, the sum of highly competitive companies and those with average competitiveness provide 66.9% of employment in the region. However, the report highlights that, despite this loss of weight, both in GDP and employment, the contribution of highly competitive companies in the Valencian Community to the generation of wealth and work is “higher than that of their counterparts.” Spanish”.
While Valencian companies with this level of competitiveness generate 53.8% of GDP and 43.8% of regional employment, the average for Spanish companies is 48.1% and 30.5%, respectively. This greater contribution from Community companies denotes important solidity in the Valencian economy, but, at the same time, shows a gap between the most and least competitive business groups, as highlighted by the authors of the report.
Among the reasons, Alejandro Escribá, coordinator of the GECE Observatory, maintains that “the size of Valencian companies is slightly smaller and that may in some way be hindering this level of competitiveness, but there are companies of all sizes that are highly competitive.” In the Valencian Community, microenterprises (66.8%) and small companies (27.5%) make up 94.3% of those operating in the territory, while large companies barely make up 1%. In the national total, the data are similar, although with greater relevance of large companies, 1.3% of the total, and lower prevalence of micro companies (65.7%).
Likewise, the study recalls that companies with high levels of competitiveness have a greater presence in branches of activity with little weight in the regional economy, an argument that could explain this effort that is not fully rewarded at a general level. And in total, of the 18 sectors into which the Valencian economy is divided in the report, only in seven of them (whose weight is reduced to 22% of the region’s GDP) the level of competitiveness is above of the national average: Water and sanitation, Information and communications, finance and insurance, education, health, extractive industries and other services (associative activities, personal services…).
