Digital Transformation in the Context of Sustainable Development of European Countries

Abstract

The country’s sustainable development is focused on improving the quality of life at the global level, ensuring equal access to education and public goods, and caring for the environment and biodiversity, as well as responsible consumption and production. Digital technologies are among the main drivers of sustainable development. It is very important to develop government strategy and choose correct measures aimed at ensuring sustainable development of the countries in terms of the digitalization processes. The purpose of the research is to investigate the nature of the correlation between indicators of digital development and sustainable development of the European countries, as well as to identify policy directions and measures regarding their digital and sustainable progress. Methods of the research are principal component analysis, geometric aggregation, and cluster analysis. The positive correlation within the digital and sustainable development is observed. Most indicators of digital and sustainable development positively correlate with each other. Based on PCA, it was found that indicators of sustainable development have a stronger intercorrelation than those of digital development. Based on the construction of integral indicators of digital and sustainable development, a cluster analysis was conducted. The main digital tools that contribute to the achievement of each of the 17 goals of sustainable development were determined. The results of the analysis provide a suitable basis for comparing the digital and sustainable development of individual countries and offer opportunities to identify tools and strategy directions for policymakers.