According to a Eurostat study, this region of Wallonia enjoys the highest intensity of R&D of all Europe's regions.
EU regions with the highest intensity of R&D
(R&D spending > 4% of GDP)
Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Austria and Sweden: data 2011. United Kingdom: data 2012.
The European Union (EU) accords great importance to regional policies. The regional directory, published every year by Eurostat, the European Union's statistical office, offers an overview of European regional statistics in a wide range of fields. Therefore, it constitutes a useful tool for understanding the regional diversity which exists within the EU and also shows how the national figures do not always paint a complete picture, thus reflecting the full complexity of what is happening in the EU.
In 2012, the EU regions with the highest intensity of research and development (R&D) were the Province of Walloon Brabant in Belgium (where R&D spending represented 7.8% of the GDP), Braunschweig (7.3%) and Stuttgart (6.2%), both of which are in Germany. Out of the thirteen EU regions with R&D spending greater than 4% of the GDP, six of them were in Germany, two of them in the United Kingdom and one respectively in Belgium, Denmark, France, Austria and Sweden. In all of the EU, 35 regions showed an intensity of R&D greater than 3% of the GDP. On the other end of the scale, the regions of Ciudad Autónoma de Ceuta in Spain, South-east in Romania, Ionia Nisia in Greece and Severen tsentralen in Bulgaria (about 0.1% each) were the EU regions which showed the lowest intensity of R&D. Out of the ten EU regions with R&D spending of less than 0.2% of the GDP, three were in Bulgaria, two respectively in Greece, Spain and Romania and one in Poland.