Technological sovereignty of the EU in advanced 5G mobile communications: An empirical approach

Two key issues within the debate around ‘technological sovereignty’ in the European Union are (i) access by countries and firms to enabling and emerging technologies and (ii) how strategic dependencies can be managed in order to preserve competitive positions in global value chains. In this paper, we present and discuss a multidimensional synthetic metric – the Technological Sovereignty Index (TSI) – to provide a global measure that captures the degree of exposure to specific technologies by a country (or group of countries) as well as the vulnerabilities that may be present. The paper validates the TSI by examining the EU's position (until 2021) within the global value chain of advanced 5G mobile communications, focusing on the hardware and component segments. Our findings reveal a weak degree of technological sovereignty due to (i) the shortage of specialized human capital in the EU and (ii) outsourcing trends in the relevant segments; however, untapped capabilities may exist that could partially offset strategic shortcomings.