4.5Economic importance of Flemish Spearhead clusters

By Astrid Volckaert (KU Leuven)

In this chapter we focus on the economic importance of the seven Flemish Spearhead clusters. These Spearhead clusters have been launched between 2017 and 2021. They are active in seven different Strategic Domains: chemicals and plastics (Catalisti), logistics (VIL), materials (SIM), food (Flanders Food), energy and construction (Flux50), the blue economy (de Blauwe cluster) and health tech (MEDVIA).

At the request of the Flemish Government, we analyse the economic importance of the Flemish Speadhead clusters on a yearly basis. The key conclusions are grouped around three themes and presented below. Further details - including methodology, additional indicators and cluster specific analyses - can be found on the STORE website (note: available in Dutch only).

First, we look at the most important economic indicators. We present the overall results as well as segmentations by NACE sector, employment class, multinational character, province and age class. Eventhough the clusters only account for 1% of the total number of firm in Flanders, they account for 16% of the employment and 26% of the value added in Flanders. Cluster members also have a higher labour productivity compared with the overall Flemish economy.

Secondly, we make a decomposition in the growth of the cluster members, differentiating between remaining, entering or exiting members. Between 2021 and 2022 cluster membership has increased by 10%, employment decreased by 6% and value added increased by 40%. Labour productivity is higher for the entering firms than for the exiting firms.

In the third part, we present the evolution of employment and added value compared to the baseline year in 2012. We see an increase in employment mainly in the service sector. For the evolution in value added, we see a recovery after the COVID year 2020. Cluster members in the industry have a higher increase in value added than cluster members in service sectors. For the evolutions in labour productivity and Total Factor Productivity we refer to the reports available on the STORE website.