Latvia

The EIS country pages provide for each of the European countries covered by the EIS 2007 a performance chart showing performance by indicator relative to the EU mean, a radar graph showing the innovation performance for each of the innovation dimensions relative to the country’s SII performance and the data tables showing, where available, time series data for the SII, the dimensions and each of the indicators.

More information is available on each country is available in the EIS report and its thematic papers which are available on the INNO Metrics website). The EIS 2007 thematic papers provide information on services innovation, the impact of differences in socio-economic conditions on innovation performance, innovation efficiency and non-R&D based innovation.

Latvia's overall innovation performance places it among the group of "catching-up countries" with a performance that is well below EU average but increasing towards the EU average over time.  Other EU countries within this group and with a similar level of performance are Malta, Lithuania, Hungary, Greece, Slovakia, Poland, Portugal, Bulgaria and Romania. Based on current trends, Latvia would reach the EU average level of innovation in performance in around 20 years.
 
Latvia ranks relatively highly on the dimension of Innovation drivers where it is above the EU average on the indicator of Youth education attainment level. It performs relatively weakly on the dimension of Applications, where it is well below the EU average on the indicators of Exports of high technology products, Sales of new-to-firm products and Medium-high/ high-tech manufacturing employment. The analysis shows that Latvia is below average in its efficiency of transforming innovation inputs into outputs