National patent statistics

In 2003 Germany was by far the leader in EU patenting while in the same time the EU-27 Member States applied for more than 60 000 patents to the European Patent Office (EPO). In Asian countries very high growth rates were noticed for the same period with China and India catching rapidly up. Worldwide ratios with more than 200 patent applications per million inhabitants were reported by Switzerland (426), Israel (237) and Japan (217). The United States were leader in 2000 in the triadic patent families, where the three main economies of the world continued to play the most important role.