Every year, the Financial Times’ investment expert division fDi Intelligence announces the prestigious investment ranking titled European Cities and Regions of the Future, which compares the most promising investment destinations across Europe. In this year’s ranking, the honorable TOP ten places in four categories went to the city and region of Kaunas.
European Cities and Regions of the Future 2024 ranking looks at European cities and regions, assessing their economic, financial, and quality of life strengths, seeking and discovering the most promising areas for investment attraction, economic development, and business development.
It assessed as many as 330 European cities divided by population size into five groups – major, large, mid-sized, small, and micro cities – and 141 European regions divided into large, mid-sized, and small regions.
A judging panel of experts in investment promotion and economic development, in addition to common ranking, assessed cities and regions across five subcategories: economic potential; business friendliness; connectivity; human capital and lifestyle; and cost-effectiveness.
“The fact that Kaunas is noticed and evaluated by international experts year after year as a favorable place for long-term and sustainable investments is not only a recognition of the city’s potential but also of its strategy’s consistency. The weight of such insights and rankings is further strengthened by new businesses that set up in Kaunas and the Kaunas region and foreign investments that the city attracts,” Mayor of Kaunas, Visvaldas Matijošaitis, said.
Kaunas belongs to the category of small cities, where it took an honorable place in the first TOP ten in the Business Friendliness category. Kaunas was ranked seventh, leaving behind Romanian and UK cities.
In the Human Capital and Lifestyle category, the city of Kaunas is ranked seventh, ahead of such competitors as Graz in Austria or Reykjavik in Iceland.
Kaunas also entered the TOP ten in the foreign investment strategy (fDi Strategy) category, placing eight and ahead of such competitors as Klaipėda and Reykjavik.
The Kaunas region, which participated in the category of small European regions, was ranked ninth in the cost effectiveness category, overtaking the Vilnius region, which took the tenth place.
“It is nice to see that the strategic direction chosen by the city to increase investment competitiveness by promoting the popularity of specialist studies needed for priority sectors is bringing international recognition. Investors who choose Kaunas appreciate the highly qualified employees here, who are not afraid of challenges, so these results perfectly reflect both the expectations of investors and the activities of recent years, aimed at increasing the number of specialists and making the business environment friendly to investors,” Tadas Stankevičius, head of Kaunas IN, which is responsible for monitoring and improving Kaunas’ investment environment, notes.
Over the past few years, VšĮ Kaunas IN has implemented several programs to attract young talents to Kaunas, encouraging them to choose the most promising and in-demand fields of study in the labor market. It has created a KarjeraKaune.lt platform, the Study in Kaunas campaign highlighting the city’s attractiveness for higher education studies, and The Future for Electronics program, which encourages young people to choose the field of technology and provides arguments for such choice.
As the organizers of the rankings, who overviewed the results of 2024, observe, this year’s subcategories are dominated by cities from Central and Eastern Europe. Germany’s Frankfurt, Poland’s Wroclaw, and Luxembourg City were ranked quite high in the categories of large, medium-sized, and small cities.
In the general assessment, London, Amsterdam, and Dublin shared the top three leading positions among the large European cities. In the overall assessment of large regions, the French region of Paris (Île-de-France) has traditionally been unbeaten, followed by the West Midlands in the United Kingdom and North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany.
