European Union countries, initially developing dynamically, began to gradually show weaker growth and significantly less susceptibility to the use of modern technologies in the mid-nineties. This weakened not only Europe itself but—worse still—began to reduce its chances in economic competition with the USA and Asian countries. However, because European countries are deeply convinced that technical progress and labor productivity will determine the position of this part of the world in the global economy, the so-called Lisbon Strategy was formulated at the 2002 European Union summit in Lisbon, which was intended to make the Union the “most competitive and dynamic area in the world” by 2010. In addition to many economic reforms, EU countries were to jointly develop and finance scientific research from the Union budget and invest in the latest technologies to narrow the gap with the USA. Unfortunately, the next two years did not bring significant improvement. While some countries, such as Germany, did not have major delays in implementing this plan, others, such as Spain, Portugal, Greece, or Italy, did not cope with these tasks. This was certainly contributed to by a general slowdown in economic growth in the last two years. However, 2003 already brought signs of economic recovery, and the prospect of 10 further countries joining the Union again set the task for the Union to return to the goals of the Lisbon Strategy. Especially since the majority of these ten are countries with weak ICT infrastructure, which will mean a significant weakening of average European indicators. Therefore, at the EU summit held in Brussels in March of this year, after noting that the gap between the American and European economies continues to widen, it was decided to quickly proceed with economic reforms and also to restore priority to ICT development. This will force EU countries to accelerate technical progress, especially in the economy. The implementation of tasks set by the European Commission, including those of the Lisbon Strategy, found parallel actions aimed at monitoring changes occurring in the economies of individual EU countries. Among these initiatives was “The Enterprise Policy Scoreboard,” which is part of the Commission’s systematic research on competitiveness, published in the form of the “European Competitiveness Report” and “The Innovation Scoreboard.” Since ICT has been recognized as one of the most important factors of economic competitiveness, many studies have been directed precisely at their development. Starting from 2002, the results of these studies also include the economies of countries joining in 2004 and those applying to the European Union.
The most important indicators of ICT development were considered to be: budget expenditures, internet usage, e-commerce, use of broadband internet access, and telecommunications charges. In this order, the values of the relevant indicators will be presented below in a ranking system.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 4/2004.