EU Regional Competitiveness Index 2.0

This paper presents the fifth edition of the European Regional Competitiveness Index (RCI). Since its first edition, RCI 2010 (Dijkstra et al., 2011), the RCI has grown into a much-cited and widely used index. The focus of the first few editions was on capturing the differences in competitiveness between regions at one point in time. As more editions were published, however, the focus expanded to capturing changes over time in a robust manner. This presented several challenges: the list of indicators has changed over time; some indicators are no longer collected or are no longer relevant; and new indicators have been added to capture new issues. In addition, the changes in the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) 2 regions of Croatia, Ireland, Lithuania and Poland have created breaks in the time series.