This paper seeks to provide a representation of European economic integration that would discriminate between the random effect of regional clustering by geographical vicinity (as the conventional area definitions suggest) and the hypothesized effect of competitive developments underpinned by homogeneous areas of integration. The investigation is based on a simple but comprehensive statistical analysis of the competitive position of thirty-three European countries, for which data were collected targeting five determinants of competitive similarity and twenty-seven corresponding indicators. The results confirm the fact that countries tend to cluster into larger groups the more general their denominator is, say, political legacy, historical circumstances or shared ideology. At the same time, a set of group behavioral patterns suggests that a better understanding of regional effects of integration strongly relates to a similarly better representation of regional groupings based on comparable competitive evolutions.
