Review of measures and data sources on intangibles, ICT use and innovation in European service sectors

Indicser Review Paper No. 1

This report summarises first results of Work Package 2 of the INDICSER project. It presents a review of measures and data sources on intangibles, ICT use and innovation in service sectors across European countries.

A main aim of the INDICSER project is to provide indicators that are most likely to be useful in informing policy regarding growth and productivity in service sectors in the European Union. These indicators include measures of output, input and productivity growth at the industry level as well as indicators of determinants of productivity. Recent research has shown that intangible investments such as software, R&D, brand equity and firm specific investments explain nonnegligible proportions of GDP in industrialized countries (see e.g. Giorgio Marrano et al. 2006 for the UK, Javala et al. 2007 for Finland and van Rooijen-Horsten et al. 2008 for the Netherlands, Roth and Thum, 2010, for an EU15 country sample). An important part of intangible investments is linked to service activities