The global position of the EU in complex technologies

Valentina Di Girolamo (), Alessio Mitra (), Julien Ravet (), Océane Peiffer-Smadja () and Pierre-Alexandre Balland ()
Additional contact information
Valentina Di Girolamo: European Commission
Alessio Mitra: European Commission
Julien Ravet: European Commission
Océane Peiffer-Smadja: European Commission
Pierre-Alexandre Balland: European Commission

EU research and innovation paper series from Directorate General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) of the European Commission

Abstract: The COVID-19 crisis has revealed severe EU dependencies in several strategic sectors, making the need to strengthen European capacities in key technological domains more urgent than ever. This paper studies the relationship between knowledge complexity and countries’ technological dependency, with a focus on the EU’s position vis-à-vis other major economies. Using patent data retrieved from the OECD REGPAT database, we calculate the knowledge complexity index at technological level for a set of countries over the period 1990-2020 to assess the EU’s technological capabilities on the international scene. Our findings first show that the EU’s overall position has progressively worsened vis-à-vis the US, China, Japan, and South Korea over the last three decades. China, on the contrary, has considerably increased its technology capabilities, including relatively to the US. Second, we find that the EU’s technological base is more diversified than that of other major economies, but the EU is disproportionally more specialised in less complex technologies than its counterparts. Specifically, the US and China are leading in areas related to semiconductors, computer technologies, optics, digital communication, and audio-visual technologies. The EU shows a higher specialisation index in less complex technologies in fields such as food chemistry, climate and environmental technologies. Third, by investigating complementarity levels between all countries, we show that the EU is particularly dependent on just a few countries (including the US and China) in the most complex technologies.

Keywords: Research and Innovation funding; impact assessment; econometric methods; spillover effects; mediation analysis; policy evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C18 O32 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2023-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/knowl ... ogies_en?prefLang=hr (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eug:wpaper:ki-bd-23-002-en-n

DOI: 10.2777/454786

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EU research and innovation paper series from Directorate General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) of the European Commission
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Paolo Pasimeni, Head of Unit, DG RTD unit G1 ().