The global position of the EU in complex technologies

The COVID-19 crisis has revealed severe EU dependencies in several strategic sectors, making the need to strengthen European capacities in key technological domains more urgent than ever. This paper studies the relationship between knowledge complexity and countries’ technological dependency, with a focus on the EU’s position vis-à-vis other major economies. Using patent data retrieved from the OECD REGPAT database, we calculate the knowledge complexity index at technological level for a set of countries over the period 1990-2020 to assess the EU’s technological capabilities on the international scene. Our findings first show that the EU’s overall position has progressively worsened vis-à-vis the US, China, Japan, and South Korea over the last three decades. China, on the contrary, has considerably increased its technology capabilities, including relatively to the US. Second, we find that the EU’s technological base is more diversified than that of other major economies, but the EU is disproportionally more specialised in less complex technologies than its counterparts. Specifically, the US and China are leading in areas related to semiconductors, computer technologies, optics, digital communication, and audio-visual technologies. The EU shows a higher specialisation index in less complex technologies in fields such as food chemistry, climate and environmental technologies. Third, by investigating complementarity levels between all countries, we show that the EU is particularly dependent on just a few countries (including the US and China) in the most complex technologies.