Bulgarian is the top Digital Riser for Europe and North America in the Digital Riser Report 2020

15 September, 2020

 

Bulgarian is the top Digital Riser for Europe and North America in the Digital Riser Report 2020 by the European Center for Digital Competitiveness by ESCP Business School in Berlin. The report analyses and ranks the changes that 140 countries around the globe have seen in their digital competitiveness over the last three years. It measures the two core dimensions of digital competitiveness, i.e. the country’s ecosystem and its mindset, and uses data from the Global Competitiveness Report issued by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

According to the report, Bulgaria and Montenegro improved the most in the ecosystem and mindset dimensions, respectively. Bulgaria’s outperformance is explained by its “Digital Bulgaria 2025” lighthouse initiative by the Ministry of Transport, Information Technologies and Communications, which was launched in 2018 as a continuation of the national programme “Digital Bulgaria 2015”. Its goal was to modernise and implement intelligent IT solutions in all areas of economic and social life.

‘Also, the Digital National Alliance led a lot of initiatives to improve digitalisation free of charge, for example by ensuring digital skills, aligning business needs and education and supporting young Bulgarian talents both locally and globally’, the report states.

Digital Riser Report 2020 measures the two core dimensions of digital competitiveness, i.e. the country’s ecosystem and its mindset, based on five items each – e.g. “Ease of hiring foreign labour” for the ecosystem dimension and “Attitudes towards entrepreneurial risk” for the mindset dimension – from the Global Competitiveness Report issued by the World Economic Forum (WEF). 

The Digital Riser Report analyses the progress of 140 countries along the mindset and ecosystem dimensions by looking at the absolute, accumulated change in ranks between 2017 and 2019. Countries were analysed and compared relative to their peers in terms of regions (e.g. Europe and North America) or group membership (e.g. G20), to ensure the comparability of results relative to a comparative baseline.

The full report is available for download here.