There’s more digital things than we dreamt of
The European Commission has published its league table of digital countries and the Best of Europe’s tech world is, you guessed it, Denmark!
Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland make up the remaining top four, proving that Scandis really do do IT better. But in a not-too-shabby performance, the UK is jostling for attention at number six, right behind plucky Belgium.
The Commission came up with the table after examining more than 30 different factors, each given a specific weighting. Connectivity and digital skills (“human capital” in Commish-speak) were considered essential for a digital economy, and together make up half a country’s total score.
Some of the “indicators” considered include how widespread, fast and affordable broadband is, the use of online activities from news to shopping, take up of eInvoicing, cloud services and eCommerce, and digital public services (such as eGovernment and eHealth).
Unsurprisingly, the Digital Scorecard survey found that the vast majority of Europeans use the internet on a regular basis, but that ranges from 93 per cent in Luxembourg to 48 per cent in Romania.
However, there are barriers – only 15 per cent of smaller businesses sell online and of that figure, less than half do so across borders.
According to the Commission: “Digital public services are an everyday reality in some countries but almost non-existent in others: 33 per cent of European internet users have used online forms to send information to public authorities” but that runs from a high of 69 per cent in Denmark to 6 per cent in Romania.
And the gap grows even wider in eHealth services: 100 per cent of general practitioners in Estonia use ePrescriptions to transfer instructions to pharmacists online. In Malta that figure is zero.
Back in November last year, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) issued its annual Measuring the Information Society report, and found that (yep, you guessed it again) Denmark is the world's most technologically-developed nation.
South Korea scored the win in the previous version of the report, but was now in second.
The ITU calculated those rankings by measuring several factors, including but not limited to, fixed-phone subscriptions per 100 inhabitants; cellular subscriptions per 100 inhabitants; percentage of households with a computer; and percentage of households with net access.---
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Jennifer Baker
Quelle/Source: The Register, 25.02.2015
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