🇦🇹Austria

• FMA Regulatory Sandbox (Experimentation)

  Austria's Financial Market Authority admitted eight FinTechs to its Regulatory Sandbox between its launch on 1 September 2020 and January 2023, five seeking authorisation as European crowdfunding service providers and three offering crypto-asset or securities services, and one participant had obtained a licence for a digital trading platform by the start of 2022.

• AMS training measures (Schulungen) for jobseekers (Learning)

  Austria's Public Employment Service (AMS) had on average 76,496 people a day enrolled in its training measures in 2025, up 1.3 percent on 2024, against an annual average of 65,126 in 2015.

• COMET, Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies (Coordination)

  Austria's COMET programme, run by the FFG for the federal ministries and co-funded by the Länder, had approved 81 competence centres and K-projects with eligible costs of 1,669.80 million euros by 30 March 2017, in which about 450 scientific partners and about 1,000 company partners cooperated, according to the Court of Audit.

• COVID-19-Kurzarbeit, 2020 to 2021 (Adaptability)

  Austria's social partners drafted a COVID-19 short-time work model on 13 and 14 March 2020, the AMS adopted its directive on 18 March and the ministers approved it on 19 March, three days after the first lockdown began, and in 2020 113,771 firms with 1.25 million employees used the scheme, against 508 firms in 2009.

• Koralmbahn Graz to Klagenfurt, opened seven years after its contracted completion date (Building)

  Austria's federal rail infrastructure company ÖBB-Infrastruktur AG forecast the Koralmbahn's total cost at 6.139 billion euros at the end of 2023, 282.4 million euros or 5 percent above the 2012 baseline, but missed both the 2018 completion date in the 2004 Koralmbahn contract and the 2023 opening date in the 2012 to 2017 framework plan, according to the Court of Audit, and the line entered passenger service on 14 December 2025.

• Bildungskarenz with Weiterbildungsgeld, and its abolition (Learning)

  Austria's Public Employment Service (AMS) paid Weiterbildungsgeld from 1998 to employees taking up to a year of educational leave, an average of about 14,000 recipients in 2021 at a cost that rose from 236 million euros in 2019 to 646 million in 2024, until the Nationalrat ended the benefit on 31 March 2025 in a budget consolidation law.

• Katastrophenfonds, the federal disaster prevention and recovery fund (Adaptability)

  Austria's federal Katastrophenfonds, a standing fund set up by law in 1966 and financed from a fixed share of income and corporate tax, paid out 667.5 million euros in 2024, including 219.5 million euros for flood and avalanche prevention through the agriculture ministry and 211.7 million euros towards private damage after the September 2024 floods, 180.75 million euros of it in Lower Austria.

• Duale Lehrausbildung, and the erosion of its training firms (Coordination)

  Austria runs apprenticeship as a joint delivery in which firms train and pay apprentices under the federal Berufsausbildungsgesetz and the economic chambers and the state certify them, and the number of firms that train fell from 39,906 in 1999 to 26,237 at the end of 2024, a loss of about a third, while apprentices fell from 194,089 in 1980 to 106,452 in 2024.

• Foresight und Technikfolgenabschätzung für das österreichische Parlament (Anticipation)

  Austria's parliament has bought external foresight and technology assessment since July 2017, after the Presidial Conference agreed unanimously in October 2016 to provide EUR 200,000 a year; the service delivers a half-yearly monitoring of future topics, survived a Europe-wide re-tender in 2022, and parliament commissioned six studies from it between 2019 and 2026.

Fill a gap, file evidence or challenge an indicator at github.com/envisioning/national-capability-benchmark. The docs explain the method and decisions.