Europe Regional Competitiveness Index 2016

The Regional Competitiveness Index provides useful insights for 263 regions to boost their economic performance. Regional competitiveness is the ability of a region to offer an attractive and sustainable environment for firms and residents to live and work.

Overall, the 2016 results are in line with those for 2013. Once again, a polycentric pattern can be observed with strong capital and metropolitan areas as the main drivers of competitiveness. Spill over effects can be seen in most of north-western Europe, but this is much less obvious in the EU regions to the east and south. High levels of within-country variation are observed in many cases which are caused by a clearly outperforming capital region compared to the other regions in the country.

Compared to the two previous editions, published in 2010 and 2013, Malta and several regions in France, Germany, Sweden, Portugal and the UK improved their score, while the scores declined in Cyprus and regions in Greece, Ireland and, more recently in the Netherlands. In eastern EU regions, competitiveness has mostly remained stable.