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Clusters in the EU-10 new member countries

This report presents the first systematic mapping
and analysis of regional clusters across the EU-10 undertaken by Christian Ketels and Orjan Solvell with contributions from Emiliano Duch, Ines Sagrario, Torbjorn Folkesson and Goran Lindqvist and completed in June 2006.

Cluster mapping is a powerful tool for policy makers as it helps to identify growing, declining and emerging business clusters on a statistical basis in a region, and determine strengths and weaknesses in the region for better organising and prioritising future economic development efforts.

The report forms part of the first Mapping project of the European Commission initiatives to establish a European Observatory of clusters which will continuously monitor clusters, their dynamics and evolution over time using the same methodology all over Europe, and analyse their impact on the economic development and performance of regions.

The European Observatory of clusters will be built upon the results of the two cluster mapping projects. The first project, completed in June 2006, covers the EU-10 countries and resulting in this report, while the second, to start in September 2006, will cover EU-15, the three Candidate Countries i.e. Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey as well as Iceland, Israel, Norway and Switzerland.


While clusters are part of regional economies in countries across the globe and at all stages of economic development, there are indications
that they might be particular important for understanding and addressing the economic
challenges that Europe is facing. Many Europeans are concerned that their prosperity, productivity, and innovation levels fail to keep pace with the United States and increasingly with competitors from other parts of the world like Asia. While the overall levels of skills, infrastructure, and institutional capacity in Europe seem to be on par or even better than elsewhere in the world, many researchers have identified rules and regulations that hamper flexibility or reduce incentives as potential reasons for the European performance gap. The recent work on clusters and competitiveness suggests that differences in regional specialization patterns across cluster categories could be an additional, potentially very powerful driver of this gap. Regional clusters enable companies to reach higher levels of productivity and be more innovative – this is what the available research indicates. If European regions suffer from weaker regional clusters and cluster portfolios than their peers elsewhere in the world, this might be an important factor keeping them behind in global competition.
The EU-10, the group of ten countries that have joined the European Union in 2004, have faced more barriers to an efficient geographical llocation of economic activities across regions than their peers in the EU-15. All have faced some level of trade, investment, and labour mobility barriers towards the EU and each other.

The report is available for downloading .

For more information on the Europe INNOVA http://www.europe-innova.org/index.jsp.