Ongoing activities at the OECD Eurostat Working Group on Regional and Urban Statistics 8-9 October 2009 Eurostat Headquarters, Luxembourg Brunella Boselli, OECD

OECD Meeting at the ministerial level: “Investing for growth, building Innovative regions” Background report Understand how regional development policies best support regional growth Reference to analytical work carried out by the OECD in recent years

Ministerial meeting: Points for discussion /1 Wide variation among regions in term of income levels and growth rates (few signs of sustained convergence) Urban regions tend to have higher income but not necessarily higher growth: No consistent relation between concentration and increasing economic performance Faster growth depends on a combination of higher utilisation of labour and increased productivity

Ministerial meeting: Points for discussion /2 Higher productivity depends on a range of factors (infrastructures, human capital, innovation performance) But no single factor explains improved performance (the positive impact of investment in infrastructure on growth depends on educational attainments and innovation levels) Simple concentration of investments and assets is not enough. The key is how assets are used, how different stakeholders interact and how synergies are exploited in regions of different type. The market does not always appear to maximise this potential alone

OECD Regions at a Glance 2009 Issued in March 2009 Focus on regional Innovation Organised around 5 major themes: 1)Innovation 2)Concentration of resources 3)Disparities among regions 4)Factors of regional growth 5)Regional well-being

Focus on Regional Innovation Correlation between patents and business R&D expenditures Patents with at least one co- inventor by residence of the co- inventor

Section2 : Concentration Percentage of GDP by the highest producing region in the country Section3: Disparities Range in TL3 regional unemployment rates

Section4: Factors of growth Components of change in GDP per capita for the top 20 regions Section5: Regional Well- being Labour force by educational attainment

Definition and measurement of metro regions /1 Two main work directions: 1)Survey of different definition of metropolitan regions to understand what criteria were more sensitive to build a comparable definition 2)Applied methodological work to produce one operational definition to be used for comparison of urban regions in OECD urban reviews. OECD Metropolitan Database (78 metros > 1.5 million pop) Similar results obtained by EU in approximating LUZ Future work (OECD-EU-Eurostat) to harmonise the 2 datasets

Definition and measurement of metro regions /2 London expert’s workshop September 09 I.Aim of the meeting was the identification of a definition based on criteria of functionality using building blocks small enough to ensure good approximation of metro boundaries II.A list of 10 metro regions was selected on which few definition will be tested III. Data availability for small building blocks orients the work toward the use of administrative/register or census data (availability of data needs to be evaluated). Data for productive activities to be estimated The work should then move forward the inclusion of a larger number of metro regions (and a framework for the delimitation of smaller urban areas)

Refinement of the OECD regional typology: USA Accessibility

Refinement of the OECD regional typology

Public investment and services for regional development Investment strategies undertaken by government to address the crisis –Coordination with sub-national actions –Comparative analysis of regional policy strategies aimed at improving efficiency and quality of public spending Intermediate product: survey on the availability of regional data on public capital expenditures Preliminary results end 2009 Final report second half 2010.

Work on Migration The Aim is to analyse how migration flows impact the local endowment of human capital and consequently the regional growth process and productivity differentials across regions Data used: Census (to describe the characteristics of leavers and incomers) Registers/Eurostat regional (to derive time varying indicators of inflows and outflows) OECD regional database to determine economic effect of migration-induced changes in human capital endowments The study will be completed by a few country cases.

Growing Lagging Regions This project investigates which factors have been successful in helping lagging regions catch up to national standards and in particular the role that regional policies have played in this process. Knowledge developed in analysing the sources of growth in OECD regions, and in preparing the OECD Territorial Reviews The aim is identifying best practices and recommendations for improving policies in this field.

The OECD Regional Database Tool on which is based most of the quantitative analytical work at the regional level of the OECD Available at: link link For EU countries the OECD relies almost entirely on the Eurostat regional database, which is a unique and very powerful tool for regional socio-economic analysis For non-EU countries the collection is made through the Working Party on Territorial Indicators

OECD Regional eXplorer Tool for interactive visualisation of regional data available at: Link eXplorer can be adopted by Countries to display their own statistics on their web-sites Contact Michael Jern at:

Thank you! More information on the OECD work on regional statistics: ional/statisticsindicato rs link