EU industrial structure - EU Bookshop - Europa

EU industrial structure 2011 — Trends and Performance
for technology and technological developments. Patent
statistics refer to the output of the research process
undertaken by firms and sectors. They provide information
on a large number of sectors and technologies and they
permit good coverage of developments over time, which
is particularly interesting. As these data are available for
a large number of countries, it is possible to calculate the
relative performance of the EU, or any other country or
region relative to the world.
Two sectoral indicators based on the number of patents
are used in this section. The first indicator, PAT1, compares
patent intensity across industrial sectors in the EU. It is
computed as the ratio of patents to employment in a sector,
relative to the same ratio for total manufacturing:
where:
PAT : patents filed by EU sector ‘i’
i,EU
PAT : patents filed by EU ‘all sectors’
T,EU
L : employment in EU sector ‘i’
i,EU
L : total employment in the EU
T,EU
Values greater (lower) than 1 indicate that the sector is
more (less) patent‑intensive than the whole economy (and
therefore than all other sectors). The indicator is calculated
82
using data from both the European Patent Office (EPO) and
the US Patent Office (USPO).
The second indicator, PAT2, compares the number of
patents in a given sector in the EU relative to total patents in
the EU with the number of patents in the same sector in the
world relative to total patents in the world. It is therefore,
an indicator of the EU sector’s relative performance in
patenting. It is defined by the following ratio:
where:
PAT : number of patents filed by EU sector ‘i’
i,EU
PAT : number of patents filed by EU ‘all sectors’
T,EU
PAT : number of patents filed by world sector ‘i’
i,W
PAT : number of patents filed by world ‘all sectors’
T,W
Values greater than 1 indicate that the sector has a ‘patent’
specialisation relative to the rest of the world. 53
As PAT1 reflects the number of patents in a sector relative
to employment, it measures patenting intensity across
sectors. 54 As was the case with R&D, this varies substantially
across sectors, from the highest values in two ICT sectors
(office machinery and telecommunications equipment)
to the near‑negligible value for clothing, wood and wood
products, and printing and publishing, cf. Figure III.20.
53 Some studies normalise the specialisation indices such that the
specialisation indices are bounded between -1 and 1. A figure
with normalised indices looks identical as figure III.17 though
re-scaled.
54 The ranking is based on the data from EPO.