Digitalisation in European regions: Unravelling the impact of relatedness and complexity on digital technology adoption and productivity growth

Stefan Apostol and Eduardo Hernández-Rodríguez

No 2317, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: Digitalisation has become a clear policy objective. Regions want to digitalise their economies to benefit from the digital world. This paper provides empirical evidence on how the adoption of new digital web technologies is shaped by previous regional digital capabilities. The analysis is based upon an economic complexity and relatedness framework using novel data on digital web technologies’ adoption for 278 European NUTS-2 regions between years 2000-2022. Results show that regions tend to adopt new digital web technologies when they already master related digital capabilities. This paper also shows how digital complexity is associated with labour productivity gains at the regional level. Conclusions shed light on how regions are adopting digital web technologies and serve as a tool for policymakers.

Keywords: Digitalisation; digital web technologies; relatedness; economic complexity; productivity; European regions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L86 O14 O33 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-08, Revised 2023-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-ino, nep-lma, nep-pay, nep-sbm, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg2317.pdf Version August 2023 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:egu:wpaper:2317

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).