Cluster Analysis of Regional Research and Development Disparities in Europe

The European continent distinguished as an entity with genuinely regionalized economic structures. Considering the existing economic disparities in the European regions were found several reasons for the regional aggregation of research and innovation activities.Our study aims to assess the European region’s total factor productivity performance of knowledge production for the period 2009-2018, proposing to identify several clusters in the European countries based on their innovative potential and their total factor productivity. The present research evaluates the performance of regional knowledge production in the European countries by using the Malmquist Index procedure. We expect to assess the efficiency of research and development inputs in knowledge production and the contribution of the total factor productivity to the innovative capacity building. The source of data was the Eurostat database. To estimate the knowledge production achievement in the European countries, we examined the total research and development expenditures and the number of researchers involved in this activity as conventional inputs in determining the Malmquist Index. As output, we considered the number of patents applied at the European Patent Office. We applied cluster analysis to identify potential factors that determine disparities among different levels of development of innovation capacity and to detect similarities within the identified clusters.