Digital Infrastructure and Educational Gender Parity in the Western Balkans (2018–2023): Integrated Dataset and Analysis Code

This deposit contains the integrated cross-national dataset and the R analysis code underlying the manuscript "Digital Infrastructure and Educational Gender Parity in the Western Balkans: A Multilevel Analysis of Regional Patterns and Technology" by Raço, Haxhi, Llagami (Beliu) and Zaçaj, submitted to Cogent Education. The dataset integrates indicators on digital infrastructure, digital society, education investment, and educational gender parity for six Western Balkan countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia) for the period 2018–2023. Data were extracted from two publicly available sources: the World Bank World Development Indicators (https://data.worldbank.org), accessed via the World Bank REST API v2; and Eurostat Digital Economy and Society Statistics (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/digital-economy-and-society), accessed via the Eurostat bulk download facility. The deposit comprises 109,810 country-year-indicator observations across 13 distinct indicators organised into five thematic domains. The accompanying R scripts document the data acquisition (wb_data.R, eurostat_data.R), data integration (combine_data.R, data_process.R), descriptive analysis (eda.R, gender_gap_analysis.R), and cross-classified multilevel modelling (multilevel_modeling.R) used to produce the published findings. The repository allows full reproduction of the published coefficients including the tertiary education effect (β = 0.284) and the variance decomposition (educational level 57.7%, country 11.3%). This deposit accompanies the article and should be cited together with it.