A Methodology for Estimating Public ICT R&D Expenditures in the EU

The goal of the present study is to create a methodology for measuring or estimating public ICT R&D expenditures in the EU and allow subsequently their monitoring. For this purpose, we estimate ICT share in existing disaggregated GBAORD data from the period 2004-2010 using an assumption that the share of ICT expenditures in GBAORD is similar to the share of ICT R&D employment. Labour Force Survey (LFS) is employed to calculate ICT R&D employment. In order to link GBAORD and LFS, we define a NABS-NACE correspondence table. Our estimation shows that the total EU ICT GBAORD accounts for €5.4bn (2010) and that, so far, the EU is lagging behind its Digital Agenda target.