Portugal has overtaken Spain in the European Regional Index for Competitiveness because of the way its companies network has focused on specialisation.
Portugal has a more competitive economy than six years ago. According to data from the European Commission, Portugal has made substantial improvements in terms of the innovation and sophistication of its business network which has enabled it to increase its level of competitiveness by around 13% on the European average and overtake Spain in the ranking.
The conclusions feature in the European Union’s Index of Regional Competitiveness released on Tuesday and revealed that over the past six years, Portugal was the country that most developed in terms of new product production technologies and innovative processes out of all the 27 member states.
This was visible too in the number of new patents registered over the period. The Portuguese unicorn Feedzai and the Universidade de Aveiro led the way in terns of Portuguese applications to register patents with the European Patents Institute which saw an overall increase in patents of 7.6% on 2021.
Feedzai and Universidade de Aveiro both registered 20 patents, Delta registered 13, NOS Inovação 9, Universidade Minho 8, Universidade Coimbra 7, Universidade Nova de Lisboa 6, Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes 5, Universidade do Porto (5) and Altice Labs 4.
According to the European Commission, Portugal’s level of innovation in its economy has gone from 62% of the European average in 2016 to 96% by the end of 2022.
The European Commission says that today Portugal is one of the 10 economies in the European Union with the greatest competitiveness, in front of Ireland, Germany, Denmark and Spain.
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Source: Essential Business