X. Vence-Deza

The objective of the paper is to bring about the geography of the Knowledge Based Economy (KBE) in Europe. By taking into consideration the knowledge/technology dimension of economic activities we try to bring about the concentration patterns of the employment of six broad sectors at the EU regional level (nuts 2). These sectors are: High, Medium and Low Knowledge Intensive Services and High, Medium and Low Tech Manufacturing; the data has been collected from the REGIO database (Eurostat). Moreover we also try to capture the regional specialisation patterns. The results regarding concentration show that the higher the knowledge/technology content of the economic activity, the higher its concentration degree is. Besides we found that some services activities (the high knowledge intensive ones), present similar concentration levels than high or medium tech manufacturing. Regarding specialisation the most outstanding result is the predominance of metropolitan regions in those more knowledge/technology intensive activities (particularly in the case of services). From a general viewpoint we conclude that an oligocentric pattern survives in Europe (with southern German regions leading high and medium tech manufacturing and the English Southeast leading in high knowledge intensive services) but with an outstanding role for state metropolis (particularly capital-cities) from both northern and southern Europe