Intangible Investment in European Economies

In this section we employ the EUKLEMS-INTANProd database for Euro Area economies (see Bontandini et al. (2023)) to conduct a sectoral analysis by country. Specifically, we construct a sectoral profile for each country, and compare how the role of intangible investment evolves over time and across sectors. 

We focus on the following seven NACE R2 sectors —Manufacturing (C), Construction (F), Information and Communication (J), Financial and insurance activities (K), Professional, scientific and technical activities (M), Education (P), and Other service activities (S) — which our analysis shows are consistently among the most intangible-intensive over time and across countries. 

This section allows readers to:

• compare national trajectories of intangible investment,

• identify the most intangible intensive sectors (i.e., more reliant on intangible assets), and

• visualise how the composition of intangible assets changes over time.

Definitions and notations

For each country–sector–year observation we use:

• Intangible investment : sum of the eight core intangible asset categories listed below.

• Tangible investment : traditional tangible gross fixed capital formation.

• Intangible intensity: ratio of intangible to tangible investment,

• Asset breakdown (the eight components of I_Intang):

  • Brand

  • Design

  • Non-Profit & Cultural Assets (NFP)

  • Own-Account Intellectual Property (OIPP)

  • Organisational Capital (OrgCap)

  • R&D

  • Software & Databases (Soft DB)

  • Training

Time-series are expressed as indices with base year 1995 = 100, whenever data are available; if 1995 is missing, the index is normalized to the first available year.

1. Country-Level Overview (Total Economy)

For every country we provide:

Three standalone pie charts (years 2000, 2010, 2020)

These charts show the composition of total intangible investment across the eight core asset categories listed above.

Each pie illustrates how the relative importance of these components has changed across the decades.

One time-series plot (indexed to 1995 = 100)

This shows how each intangible asset component has evolved over time in the overall economy, enabling users to assess:

• long-run growth of intangible capital,

• structural shifts in the composition of assets,

• periods of expansion or stagnation in investment.

2. Sector Sub-Pages 

Below each country’s total profile, there is a subsection containing sector-level pages. For comparability, each country displays sector pages for a fixed set of seven NACE sectors. These seven sectors are selected as those most commonly observed in the Top-3 or Top-5 most intangible-intensive sectors (based on the Intangible-to-Tangible share) across countries and years.

This selection rule ensures that the sectors shown are both structurally important and frequently intangible-intensive, while keeping the set of sectors consistent across countries.

For each selected sector we include:

• Three pie charts (2000, 2010, 2020)

Displaying the internal composition of intangible investment within that sector, by asset type.

• One time-series chart (1995=100)

Showing how each intangible asset type evolves over time for that specific sector.

Together, these plots help readers identify:

• innovation-driven industries,

• service-oriented sectors that are particularly intangible-heavy, 

• and how sectoral priorities shift across decades

3. Purpose of the Structure

This hierarchical format is designed to:

• make cross-country and cross-sector comparisons intuitive,

• highlight the role of intangibles in shaping economic performance,

• reveal systematic differences in intangible intensity across sectors and countries, and

• provide visually clear, data-driven insights for research, policy and academic use.

Cross-country summary of leading sectors

To complement the country and sector-level profiles, we also report two heatmaps of leading sectors over time: one for Top-3 appearances and one for Top-5 appearances by sector and year (1995–2021).

In each heatmap, every cell shows how many times a given NACE R 2 sector appears among, respectively, the three or five most intangible-intensive sectors across all countries in a specific year. The vertical axis lists the sectors (C, F, J, K, M, P, S, etc.), while the horizontal axis shows all years from 1995 to 2021. Darker shades indicate more frequent Top-3 or Top-5 appearances, signalling sectors that systematically rely on intangible capital across the Euro Area.

Taken together, these two visuals provide an aggregate view of the results: they highlight which activities (for example knowledge-intensive services such as information and communication, finance and insurance, or professional and technical services) most often dominate intangible investment under both the Top-3 and Top-5 criteria, and how their leadership evolves over the full 1995–2021 period.