LAUNCHING THE 2019 REGIONAL COMPETITIVENESS INDEX RCI 2019 European Week of Regions and Cities Brussels, 7 October 2019 1

The fourth edition of the Index is now available for all EU regions Measuring the major factors of competitiveness of EU regions at NUTS-2 level over past ten years Used in past three editions of the Cohesion Report RCI 2013 was featured in the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report 2013-14 and Eurostat regional yearbook 2014 Today we launch the 2019 edition

RCI aims at: Providing a comparable measure of competitiveness for all EU regions Helping regions to better target their development strategies and to benchmark themselves with their peers or the rest of the EU Facilitating exchanges between regions by Summarising information into an index and its components Visualising the data in an interactive manner Providing easy access to underlying data

How is the RCI constructed? RCI is an aggregate statistical measure including 74 basic indicators from official sources, 8 new to this edition, capturing concepts relevant to sustainable development, productivity and well-being Due to the regional dimension, most of the indicators included in RCI 2019 span the period 2015-2017 UK still included

How is RCI constructed? Basic group 1. Institutions 2. Macroeconomic Stability (country level) 3. Infrastructure 4. Health 5. Basic education (country level) Efficiency group 6. Higher education 7. Labor Market efficiency 8. Market size Innovation group 9. Technological readiness 10. Business sophistication 11. Innovation Basic indicators are grouped into 11 different components and 3 groups gradually moving from enabling factors of competitiveness to cutting edge ones

How is RCI constructed? Basic group 1. Institutions 2. Macroeconomic Stability (country level) 3. Infrastructure 4. Health 5. Basic education (country level) Efficiency group 6. Higher education 7. Labour Market efficiency 8. Market size Innovation group 9. Technological readiness 10. Business sophistication 11. Innovation The index takes into account the economic development of a region by giving more weight to enabling factors of competitiveness in less- developed regions and to cutting-edge factors in more-developed regions

Our definition of competitiveness "The ability of a region to offer an attractive and sustainable environment for firms and residents to live and work"

Within-country variability and the role of capitals Countries with more than two regions only are displayed in the figure

Top performers Most include capitals and world class universities Good connections Close to markets

Bottom performers No capital or large cities No famous universities Far from markets Poor connections Competitiveness levels of outermost regions are only partially captured by RCI due to their specificities and high levels of missing data

Monitoring competitiveness: wide and stable gaps In France, the gap is narrowing slightly due to the combined effect of better performances by the chasing regions and the relative lower performance of the capital region Île-de-France. In Czechia, Praha is the only region registering above the EU average (positive scores) with steadily increasing scores over the years. The gap with the rest of the country is wide and increased in 2013 compared to 2010 but has fallen slightly more recently with the top non-capital regions showing signs of improvement.

New, enhanced scorecards

New, enhanced scorecards

Monitoring competitiveness: relevant changes

Monitoring competitiveness: relevant changes

RCI is not GDP but can help it grow The RCI shows so far that: GDP per head is linked to competitiveness but does not determine it Regions can do much better or much worse especially for high GDP per capita On average, higher RCI leads (on average) to more GDP growth and … … to lower income inequality as well

RCI 2019 confirms this trend

GDP average growth (2010-2017) for different RCI levels

Low competitiveness translates into higher income inequality Stockholm London and its commuting belt Less unequal More unequal

The good recipe for being competitive Performance of 3 of the top-10 regions Performance of 3 of the bottom-10 regions Simultaneous gain in several areas rather than being excellent in just few of them is a key factor

NEW: RCI webpage linked to Open Data platform From the beginning it has been essential that the data behind the RCI is made open to allow regions and researchers to understand and explore the index and benchmark performance With RCI 2019, we go a step further: A number of the products of the RCI are made available for the first time on the ESI Fund Open Data platform This will allow users to interact with charts using filters and make time series comparisons with any region of their choice Open Data charts can be reused by stakeholders on their own websites to make their own analysis or narrative

Conclusions Four points in time available – allows a measure of competitiveness comparable across all the EU regions A wide range of new interactive tools to facilitate comparisons, monitoring and benchmarking linked to Open Data platform Shows that neither GDP nor geography are destiny, with large variations of competitiveness at similar levels of GDP or market access Helps regions improve their development strategies

More information RCI webpage: http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/information/maps/regional_competitiveness Open Data platform: https://cohesiondata.ec.europa.eu/ (to be updated with the link to the actual RCI data story – pending)