This report forms part of a broader OECD project to support Latvia in building the evidence base and institutional capacity needed for more effective, place-based regional development policy. It builds on the OECD's regional attractiveness framework, previously applied in a case study of the Latgale region (OECD, 2025[1]), and extends that approach across Latvia's remaining planning regions and all 42 municipalities. The report pursues three interconnected objectives.
The first is to provide a regionally nuanced and granular picture of territorial attractiveness across Latvia. By extending the OECD regional attractiveness framework to cover all five planning regions – Riga, Kurzeme, Latgale, Vidzeme, and Zemgale – and introducing a municipality-level extension covering all 42 local governments, the report enables meaningful analysis and comparison at a scale that regional averages typically obscure. This two-tiered approach serves multiple levels of government. At the regional and local level, it equips planning regions and municipalities with practical, place-based insights – helping to identify territorial strengths, disparities, and complementarities between places that could support inter-municipal co-operation and more co-ordinated planning. At the national level, the OECD framework provides the Ministry of Smart Administration and Regional Development (VARAM) and relevant line ministries with a systematic, comparable evidence base for assessing territorial differentiation across Latvia's regions and municipalities – supporting more spatially informed decisions on policy design, resource allocation, and the monitoring of regional development outcomes. The compasses and associated data dashboards have been provided to Latvia's local and regional governments and to VARAM as an addendum to this report and formed the basis for a series of capacity-building workshops delivered directly with municipalities to support their practical use of the framework.
The second objective is to support the integration of the OECD regional attractiveness framework into Latvia's policy monitoring infrastructure and to build capacity among national, regional, and local stakeholders to use evidence effectively across the policy cycle. This means going beyond the production of indicators to embed them in the institutions and platforms through which regional development policy is designed, tracked, and evaluated. In practice, this includes mapping relevant national data sources, recommending the integration of attractiveness indicators into existing digital platforms such as raim.gov.lv, and delivering an interactive data dashboard featuring attractiveness compasses for each locality. Capacity-building workshops were organised with local policymakers to support evidence-informed planning in line with the objectives of Latvia's Administrative Territorial Reform, and a technical report was provided to VARAM covering data sources, computations, limitations, and practical guidance for use of the indicators. The codebase for integrating the tool into local platforms has also been delivered. Guidance on using the OECD regional attractiveness framework in a Latvian policy context is set out in Chapter 2.
The third objective is to strengthen the multi-level governance conditions that enable regions and municipalities to translate territorial analysis into effective policy action. A diagnostic tool and an integrated monitoring platform are only as effective as the governance framework through which their insights are acted upon. This objective therefore encompasses a policy analysis of Latvia's multi-level governance arrangements, with a focus on the conditions for designing, monitoring, and implementing attractiveness policies across levels of government. It includes an examination of the potential for enhanced inter-municipal co-operation, further leveraging the role of planning regions as co-ordinators of programmes, policies, and investments that cut across local administrative boundaries, as well as comparative analysis on strengthening subnational competences in areas such as investment attraction, service delivery, and policy monitoring and evaluation. This governance dimension is addressed in Chapter 3.