ESA Space Economy – Partnering with Eurostat and the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) to produce official statistics on the European space sector [Jul/2024]
In March 2022, ESA launched a
cooperation project with Eurostat, to investigate the development of a European
space economy thematic account. In July 2022, the European Commission’s Joint
Research Centre (JRC) joined the project team. This tripartite cooperation is
the first of its kind at the European level. The project is receiving strong
and continuous support from all ESA and EU Member States, as well as from the
OECD (see OECD Partnership page) and the US Bureau of Economic
Analysis (BEA).
The cooperation project consists
of three initial work packages, forming a pragmatic, stepped approach with
concrete deliverables at completion of each work package.:
- A first work package refers to the definition
of the space economy for statistical purposes (work package led by ESA);
- A second consists in the development of the
methodology for the construction of the European space economy thematic account
at the national and aggregated European level, following guidelines from the
United Nations (work package led by Eurostat and JRC);
- A third work package is combining the results
obtained from the first two work packages, while testing their applicability
and fine-tuning them. This work is still on-going at the time of the
publication.
The cooperation has led to the
successful publication in December 2023, of two first ever reports on the topic
of space economy thematic account:
- Developing
a space economy thematic account for Europe jointly written by ESA,
Eurostat and the JRC.
- International,
North American and European Statistical Classifications for Space Economy
Measurement jointly written by the OECD, the US BEA, ESA, Eurostat and the
JRC.
Both reports were released at a
unique launch
event hosted by the OECD on 15 December 2023.
A first set of experimental
statistics was published by Eurostat in December 2023 as well, presenting
the level of European exports of complete satellite systems across a decade (2010
to 2021). A briefing note on A
decade of European space exports was jointly released by Eurostat, JRC,
ESA and with the support of Eurospace in February 2024.
ESA Space Economy team
cooperation with Eurostat and JRC is on-going, with several European countries now
making use of the published material to develop space economy statistics at
national level.
To know more about the work of ESA Space Economy team partnership with Eurostat and JRC, please do not hesitate to contact us!