Prospective insights on R&D in ICT

PREDICT produces statistics and analyses on ICT industries and their R&D in Europe since 2006. The project covers major world competitors including 40 advanced and emerging countries - the EU28 plus Norway, Russia and Switzerland in Europe, Canada, the United States and Brazil in the Americas, China, India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in Asia, and Australia - as well as a growing array of indicators related to the ICT content of economic activities.

ICTs determine competitive power in the knowledge economy. The ICT sector alone originates almost one fourth of total Business expenditure in R&D (BERD) for the aggregate of the 40 economies under scrutiny in the project. It also has a huge enabling role for innovation in other technological domains, let aside the impact of ICT uptake in the organisation of businesses. This is reflected at the EU policy level, where the Digital Agenda for Europe in 2010 was identified as one of the seven pillars of the Europe 2020 Strategy for growth in the Union and the achievement of a Digital Single Market (DSM) is one of the 10 political priorities set by the Commission since 2015.

PREDICT provides indicators in a wide variety of topics, including value added, employment, labour productivity and BERD, distinguishing fine grain economic activities in ICT industries (up to 22 individual activities, 14 of which at the class level, i.e. at 4 digits in the ISIC/NACE classification), media and content industries (15 activities, 11 of them at 4 digit level) and at a higher level of aggregation for all the other industries in the economy. It also produces data on Government financing of R&D in ICTs, and total R&D expenditure at the country level. Nowcasting of more relevant data in these domains is also performed up to a year before the reference date, while time series go back to 1995.

The collection presents two types of data outputs: ICT sector analysis presents in one dataset the main macroeconomic features of the ICT industry; the second family of outputs (three datasets) explore the digital transformation from different perspectives: international trade of ICT goods and services, ICT content of economic activities, and employment in ICT occupations.