Digital Competitiveness IndexTM (DCI)
The Digital Competitiveness Index (DCI) evaluates the digital readiness of a location across key foundational pillars and provides a holistic assessment of its digital standing as an aid for policy formulation. The DCI identifies key focus areas for development of a strong and sustainable digital services ecosystem. It also articulates strategic intervention required to improve digital competitiveness across key pillars – Digital Ecosystem, Enabling Environment, Human Capital, Supporting Infrastructure and Financial Attractiveness in turn improving global competitiveness. The following figure provides a high-level overview of the Digital Competitiveness Index:
Digital Competitiveness Index™ Assessment Framework
The DCI framework assesses over 100 qualitative and quantitative datapoints to represent a locations’ ability to derive competitive advantage by leveraging the emerging technologies. At a high level, the DCI is based on the following key five pillars which is then further divided into eight sub-pillars. These pillars include:
- Digital Ecosystem
- Sector Prioritization – Digital Services Ecosystem and Government Prioritization
- Industry Size and Growth – Digital Services Market Opportunity and Operational Landscape
- Enabling Ecosystem
- Overall Business Environment – Business Environment Supporting Digital Services Businesses
- Financial Attractiveness
- Cost Competitiveness – Ability to Attract Foreign Digital Services Investments
- Trade Enablers – Domestic & Trans-Border Services Trade Climate
- Human Capital
- Delivery Talent – Skilled and Digital Industry-Ready Talent Pool
- Resourcing and Scalability – Ability to Scale Talent Quality and Quantity
- Supporting Infrastructure
- Digital Infrastructure – Infrastructure Components Enabling Digital Services Operations
Each of these pillars have a varying degree of impact on the digital services ecosystem e.g. the Digital Ecosystem has the most bearing on the development of the digital services in a location. For assessments, the various parameters are assigned weights based on its relevance and direct impact on the sector.
As some of the data points have a lower degree of impact on the digital landscape and are also available from third party public sources, the DCI also leverages publicly available data from the World Bank and the World Economic Forum for some of the assessment factors e.g. Under Enabling Ecosystem and Business Environment Supporting Digital Services, the framework leverages World Bank data for assessing, ’Ease of Doing Business’. However, in order to make it relevant for the digital services sector it is assigned a weight corresponding to its impact on the digital services landscape and digital investments. For example, while a location may score high on many of the WB, WEF Competitiveness parameters it may not still be considered as a global services investment destination as these factors have much less bearing on digital investment decisions. The following figure outlines the relevance of the key sub-pillars within each of the main pillars:
For more information on the assessment methodology or on country rankings email us at contact@gobalequations.com