The Geonet team has a new paper out:
Ojanperä, S., Graham, M., and Zook, M. 2019. The Digital Knowledge Economy Index: Mapping Content Production. The Journal of Development Studies. DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2018.1554208.
The paper proposes the construction of a Digital Knowledge Economy Index. It then compares country rankings on this index to more traditional metrics like the World Bank Knowledge Economy Index. What we find is that the countries that rank in the upper and middle ranges of the Digital Knowledge Economy Index have largely improved from their World Bank Knowledge Economy ranking. On the contrary, countries that rank in the lowest ranges of the Digital Knowledge Economy Index, tend to score worse than they do in the World Bank Knowledge Economy Index.
For the majority of low-income countries, including a measure of digital participation in the estimation of their attainment or preparedness for knowledge economy transformation seems to indicate challenges rather than prospects. This is a sobering reminder for policy and business circles, where knowledge economy visions are fuelled with hope and hype about the leapfrogging prospects of digitalisation.
You can access the full paper here.
