  After providing a suitable definition of numerical effectiveness for Higgs
bundles, and a related notion of numerical flatness, in this paper we prove,
together with some side results, that all Chern classes of a Higgs-numerically
flat Higgs bundle vanish, and that a Higgs bundle is Higgs-numerically flat if
and only if it is has a filtration whose quotients are flat stable Higgs
bundles. We also study the relation between these numerical properties of Higgs
bundles and (semi)stability.
