A deeper regional look into EU automotive industry value chains

The EU automotive industry has important upstream linkages that affect EU regions in a different way, depending on their position into the global value chain of the automotive industry. Therefore, policy measures addressing the EU automotive industry need to take into consideration upstream regions and upstream industries that may not be characterised by a strong automotive industry but instead supply other regions with components or innovative designs for automotive production. By using the EU Automotive Regions Alliance as a cluster of strong automotive regions in the EU, this policy brief shows the relevance of upstream interregional linkages with other regions and industries across EU Member States. On average, one third of the value added generated in the automotive industry of the Alliance regions (e.g. in Eastern European regions) is due to upstream linkages of other regions outside the Alliance. Upstream linkages of the automotive industry in the Alliance regions generate, on average, 20% of the total value added of the automotive industry of other regions outside the Alliance (e.g. Central Slovakia, Madrid and Cantabria). The uniqueness of this analysis is that it provides policymakers a deeper look into the EU territorial interdependencies of a specific industry (i.e. automotive) beyond the standard geographical country-wise definition.