Luxembourg, 19/04/2001 (Agence Europe) - In 1999, close to 45,000 patent applications have been filed by the EU Member States with the European Patent Office (EPO), which corresponds to an increase of 40% compared to 1990. With some 44% of Community applications and close to 500 applications per million people, it is Germany that proves to be the most dynamic country in this field. Below are the main elements of a report that has just been published by Eurostat.
In 1999, 37% of patent applications filed with the EPO have been presented by countries of the European Union, 26% by the United States and 12% by Japan. Compared to 1990, the applications filed by the EU Member States have increased 5.3% on average per year, while those filed by the United States and Japan increase respectively 5.6% and 1.8%.
Within the EU, Germany is by far the European country filing the largest number of patent applications, with 43.6% of the total Community applications in 1999. Followed by France (14.9%), the United Kingdom (12.3%) and Italy (7.5%). However, to take into account the different size of each country and to paint a more comparable picture of each country's innovative potential, Eurostat established a relationship between the number of patent applications and the working population: on this basis, Germany remains in the lead of EU countries with 493 million applications per million people in the labour force in 1999. This time followed by Sweden (478) and Finland (455), the Community average being set at 261. The lowest rates have been recorded in Spain (43), in Greece (15) and in Portugal (6). The trend in patent applications during the 1990s nevertheless translates into a significant effort by the latter countries to develop innovation: between 1990 and 1998, it is in Portugal that the number of applications rose the fastest (+20.8% per year on average). Followed by Spain (+14.5%), Finland (+13%), Ireland (+12.8%) and Greece (+12.5%). On the other end of the spectrum, the weakest rates of growth have been seen in the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Germany.
At the regional level, l'Ile de France was, in 1999, the EU region that filed the greatest number of applications (2,813), ahead of the German regions of Oberbayern (2,538) and Stuttgart (1,928).
Finally Eurostat notes that high technology patents represent some 20% of the applications filed with the EPO in 1999. The classification of the ten most active regions in the field of high technology emphasises a greater geographic diversity within the EU, with the presence of two German regions, but also three English regions and one Finnish.