MERIT concordance table: IPC - ISIC (rev.2)

Abstract

This document contains the MERIT concordance table between the International Patent Classification (IPC) used by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC - rev. 2) of the United Nations. ISICs are grouped into 22 different aggregate sectors. Only the manufacturing sectors are taken into account. The percentages in the last column of the table give the share of the patents in each IPC-class assigned to the accessory ISIC-category. A percentage of 100%, for example, therefore means that all patents in the IPC-class are assigned to the corresponding ISIC-category. The table makes it possible to assign the patent data by field of technology of EPO to a classification by economic sector. While constructing this table, we have used a similar concordance table (between IPC and the Finnish version of ISIC) prepared by Statistics Finland (supplied by M. Akerblom, whose help is gratefully acknowledged).