DESI and SDG 8 database for South-East European Countries

The attached document presents data on the core indicators calculated in SDG 8 such as the actual GDP per capita, the NEET and Employment rate and the DESI index dimensions, i.e. Human Capital (HC), the Connectivity (CN), the Integration of Digital Technologies (IDT) and the Digital Public Services (DPS) for the countries of the South-East region of the European Union, i.e: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland, and the period under analysis is 2014-2022, as the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) has been reported since 2014.
Data were collected from the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) Reports for the countries of the South-East European region and from the European Commission's statistical information published on Eurostat.
The aim of collecting this data was to identify the impact of the DESI index components on sustainable economic development as measured by SDG 8 indicators. Based on the presented data and econometric modeling, we confirm that the degree of digitalization of a country positively and significantly influences sustainable economic development. However, the results demonstrated major discrepancies across the countries analyzed in the sense that digitization was not the only determinant of economic development.