Measuring the Digital Economy and Society: A Study on the Application of the Digital Economy and Society Index in the Western Balkans

Measuring the digital socio-economic transformation is an essential part of good, appropriate, knowledge-based decision making. Multiple national and international indexes measure the various aspects of the digital transformation, such as the telecommunication infrastructure development, digital skills, eGovernment, eCommerce, eBusiness, etc. Focusing on the integration of the indicators that affect the digital economy and society, the European Union (EU) launched the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) in 2014 aimed to measure the progress made by the EU Member States in the progress in digital performance and competitiveness. Composed of five dimensions, DESI measures both, the impact of the digital transformation on the Digital Economy and Digital Society. As the DESI and its indicators are part of the EU Acquis Communautaire, all candidates and potential candidates for EU membership must be prepared to provide complete datasets for measuring the indicators introduced and used by the EU. Currently, all Western Balkan (WB) economies are either candidates or potential candidates for EU membership. With the digital agenda ranked high on the government agendas, this raises the questions of the level of preparedness of the WB economies in providing the complete high-quality datasets required to calculate the DESI. Specifically, how is the WB economy data methodologically aligned with the DESI and other relevant EU methodologies (e.g. Survey on ICT usage in households and by individuals, Study on Broadband Coverage in Europe, eGovernment Benchmark Study, etc.)? This paper aims to assess the readiness of each WB economy to provide the complete datasets for the DESI indicators. Key findings are that WB economies are generally ready to provide methodologically align data for the DESI indicators, especially for the indicators that use data from the national databases. Key challenges in the existing domestic methodologies are generally linked to the indicators that are extracted from the Commission ad hoc studies, especially for those where the WB economies (or some of them) are not included.