Bucharest ranks among Europe’s ten most knowledge-intensive capital cities, according to the report The Geography of Europe's Brain Business Jobs of the think tank European Center for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform.

The report looked at “where the knowledge workers of Europe flock to and where investments in their innovative ideas bear fruit.” It analyzed detailed enterprise employment statistics in 28 different European countries and their respective capital regions, examining how many people work in specialized knowledge-intensive companies. The report refers to these jobs as brain business jobs. Four different fields of brain business jobs are surveyed: the tech-sector, information and communications technology (ICT), advanced services and creative professions.

The Romanian capital region is ranked the 9th in Europe in attracting brain business jobs, ahead by of Helsinki, ranked the 10th.

Overall, Romania occupies the last, 28th place in the country ranking of brain business jobs, with 28.8 such jobs per 1,000 working age population. Investment in R&D in the country is the lowest in the EU.

However, Romania’s capital region Bucharest does much better than the country as a whole. It scored 108.2 brain business jobs per 1,000 working age population. This shows that “brain business jobs are more concentrated in Romania than in most places,” the report notes. This is more common to the former planned economies of Eastern and Central Europe, where brain business jobs tend to be strongly focused to the capital regions.

Among the European capitals surveyed, the one with the highest share of brain business jobs in all of Europe is Bratislava, at 179.1 such jobs per 1,000 working population. This happened despite “the fact that Slovakia as a nation has a mediocre concentration of brain business jobs – it ranks 18th among 28 European countries.”

Other cities and countries in Eastern Europe are also overtaking old EU peers in terms of brain business jobs. It is the case of Prague, ranked 3rd among surveyed European capitals, with 162.9 brain business jobs per 1,000 working population.

“There is a clear pattern. Brain business jobs are mobile and will quickly migrate to regions that provide favorable conditions. That is where economic growth will take off,” Stefan Fölster, one of the authors of the report, explained.

The full report can be checked here.

editor@romania-insider.com