A company with capital to deploy in European defence manufacturing faces an unusually well-funded and unusually badly specified decision. The policy environment has rarely been more encouraging: loan instruments, co-financing programmes and an accelerated permitting regime all now exist to move industrial activity onto European soil. What does not exist is a reliable way to compare the places where that activity might go. The indicators that are published regionally — employment, education, research intensity, labour costs, energy prices — are produced for macroeconomic surveillance, not for industrial siting, and they are measured in units that do not correspond to anything a plant manager decides.
