Authors: Davide Castellani, Silvia Cerisola, Giulia Felice, Emanuele Forlani and Veronica Lupi

This report provides a mapping of the available data for a list of key indicators of competitiveness at the sectoral, regional and aggregate level, derived from D3.1. For each indicator we have identified the relevant level of disaggregation (aggregate/country, sectoral and regional). Out of a total of 43 indicators, 41 can be computed at the aggregate level, 32 at the sectoral level and 16 at the regional level. Therefore, we have an overall number of 89 indicators for which we need to map data availability.

The indicators are grouped into a smaller number of homogeneous categories, namely:

  • Price and Cost – Exchange Rate and Unit Labour Costs
  • Firms Dynamics
  • Labour Productivity and Total Factor Productivity
  • Trade Competitiveness
  • Intangible Assets and Financial Activity
  • Inward and outward FDI
  • Global Value Chain
  • Innovation activity (all firms and SMEs) and R&D expenditures

The indicators of competitiveness at the aggregate, sectoral and regional level are usually computed from easily accessible sources of data, so key dimension along which one can evaluate the extent to which an indicator can be computed (degree of computability) is the time span for which the indicator is available. In this perspective, we defined three levels of the degree of computability based on the length of the time series.

Overall, the analysis carried out shows that the degree of computability for the macro-indicators is quite good for the EU28 countries. Nevertheless, there are some exceptions. It is possible to group the exceptions in three main categories: i) by country, i.e., there are countries for which data availability is particularly scarce for the majority of indicators; ii) by indicator, i.e., there are indicators on which information is particularly scarce for the majority of countries and levels of aggregation; iii) by level, i.e., there are levels of aggregation on which information is particularly scarce for several indicators for the majority of countries.

As concerning the exception by country, information is scarcer for Croatia and Greece than for the other countries.

As for the second category of exceptions, information on Entry rate and Exit rate indicators belonging to Firms Dynamics is quite heterogeneous across countries and level of aggregation, but in general only half of the countries show the highest level of computability. The indicators belonging to Intangible assets and financial activity are computable for only a few countries and/or for a quite short time interval. The information on R&D Expenditure and Output is in general quite good with the exception of License and patent revenues from abroad as % GDP and EU Summary Innovation Index (SII), which are computed and comparable across countries for all EU countries since only 2004 (2006 for Spain and Greece), as for the former, and since 2008 for the latter.

As for the third category of exceptions, by level of aggregation, it should be mentioned that in general the availability of information for the indicators at the sectoral and regional level is both scarcer and less homogeneous than the one at the aggregate level across countries and indicators. In particular, the indicators’ computability is high at the aggregate level, but quite limited at both sectoral and regional ones for those indicators belonging to Labour Productivity and Total Factor Productivity (Group 3), Innovation activity, SMEs and R&D Expenditure and Output. The indicators’ computability is high at the aggregate level but quite limited at the at the sectoral one for those indicators belonging to Trade Competitiveness, on the one side, while the indicators’ computability is high at the aggregate level, but quite limited at the at the regional one for those indicators belonging to the Innovation activity(all firms), on the other side.