(13 October 2015) – The regional yearbook, published every year by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, provides an overview of European regional statistics covering a wide range of fields.
On the occasion of the 13th European Week of Regions and Cities, a news release presents a small selection of the indicators that can be found in the regional yearbook 2015:
- Only in six EU regions was the employment rate of women aged 25-34 higher than that of men: Madeira in Portugal (68.2% for women vs. 62.4% for men, or a difference of 5.8 percentage point), in Friesland (1.7 pp) and Groningen (1.5 pp) in the Netherlands, in Asturias (0.8 pp) and the Balearic islands (0.3 pp) in Spain, as well as in Cyprus (0.5 pp).
- A relatively high contribution of industrial activities to regional gross value added was largely concentrated in a cluster of regions that spread over southern Germany, the whole of the Czech Republic (apart from the capital region), up into Poland, and down through regions of Slovakia, Austria, Hungary and Slovenia.
- In 2012, the EU regions with the highest intensity in Research & Development (R&D) were Walloon Brabant in Belgium (R&D expenditure accounted for 7.8% of GDP), Brunswick (7.3%) and Stuttgart (6.2%) both in Germany.