Hungary to Move Up in EU Innovation Ranking

The European Commission’s 2023 Innovation Scoreboard has moved us from fourth to third place – with Budapest and its region as the engine of growth, standing out among the Hungarian regions. Globally, the European Union is ahead of China and Japan, but its gap with the leaders is growing, reports Világgazdaság.

The European Commission’s 2023 Innovation Scoreboard will be published soon, and Hungary will be the only country to move up in the rankings.

The performance-based ranking has four tiers:

1. Leading innovators (above 125 percent of the EU average)
2. Strong innovators (between 100 and 125 percent of the EU average)
3. Moderate innovators (between 70 and 100 percent of the EU average)
4. Emerging innovators (below 70 percent of the EU average).

Last year, three Member States- the Netherlands, Cyprus and Estonia- moved up, but this year,

Hungary will be the only one to change categories, moving from emerging to moderate innovators.

The EU as a whole has improved by 8.5 percent over the last eight-years, with Cyprus showing an impressive 35 percent improvement, Hungary slightly below the average at 7.7 percent, and France and Luxembourg even slightly worse.

The general truth is that geographically, there is a dividing line between more and less developed areas, with northern and western countries making faster progress, while the southern and eastern regions are slower. Across categories, this means that northern and western Europe have the most leading and strong innovators, and in the eastern and southern part of the continent are the moderate and emerging groups.

It is also a fact that across the EU, based on the Regional Innovation Scoreboard (RIS), capital cities are more innovative than rural areas.

Most of Hungary, for example, remains in the emerging category, while Pest county is already in the top ten of the emerging countries and

Budapest is a clear stand-out, so much so that it has been moved up one place overall.

Tibor Navracsics, Minister for Regional Development, spoke at the Hungary 2030 conference of the Hungarian think tank, Egyensúly Intézet in April. He said that Budapest is developing at a rate of 156%, while the worst performing region, the Northern Great Plain, is only growing at 49%.

It is already a lesson from the recent innovation scoreboards that the European Union is lagging behind on a global scale. In addition to world leader South Korea, Canada, the United States, and Australia are also ahead of the EU.

The good news is that Japan and China are now behind us for the time being, but they could overtake the EU in the near future.

An interesting aspect of the methodology is that for many indicators, provisional data was used in order to work with the most up-to-date information, obviously providing different results than if only closed data had been used.

Via Világgazdaság, Featured image via Pexels

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