The technology gap between Europe on the one hand and the United States and China on the other is growing. While these two global technological powers have succeeded in significantly reducing their dependence on foreign countries in recent years, Europe today is more dependent on foreign digital technologies than it was about a decade ago.
This came in a comprehensive comparative study, announced today, Wednesday (October 28), prepared by the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integrative Studies (CASSIS) of the German University of Bonn, in cooperation with the Berlin-based Vodafone Institute for Society and Communications.
To conduct the study, researchers developed what is known as the “Digital Dependence Index” (DDI), which examined 51 industrialized and emerging countries over a period of 14 years, from 2010 to 2023. This index measures the level of digital dependence on a scale ranging from 0 (complete independence) to 1 (complete dependence), in four main areas: hardware components of technology, IT services, software platforms, and technology patents.
According to the index, the average digital adoption of European countries between 2010 and 2023 increased slightly by 0.5 percentage points to 0.69. In the same period, China succeeded in reducing its index by 10.8 percentage points to 0.43. As for the United States, it achieved an improvement of 6.0 percentage points, maintaining its global lead as the most independent country in the digital field, recording a value of 0.38.
Germany ranks 25th globally, recording a value of 0.73 on the Digital Dependence Index (DDI), which places it in the middle category alongside Austria and Thailand. Between 2010 and 2023, the level of digital vulnerability in Germany increased by 2.4 percentage points; This is something that the study's authors attribute mainly to the increasing reliance on software and information technology services.
The study showed that the German economy is the least dependent on ICT patents among all the European countries included in the study. But this European lead is not enough to compete at the global level, as Germany remains 26% behind the United States, 20% behind China, and 12% behind South Korea.
Like most European partners, Germany relies almost entirely on foreign suppliers for digital platforms, operating systems, search engines, and cloud computing services. Thus, Germany joins countries such as France, Italy and Britain that are classified in the group of “post-industrial” countries. These are countries that enjoy strength in the industrial and scientific research sectors, but at the same time they suffer from large gaps in digital platform systems.
At the level of Europe as a whole, a sharp division appears. While Europe records relatively average performance in the areas of information technology services (with an index of 0.42) and the physical components of technology (with an index of 0.59), the situation in the areas of software platforms (with an index of 0.98) and technological patents (with an index of 0.99) reflects almost complete dependency on countries outside the continent.
At the same time, researchers warn of statistical distortion caused by what is known as the “Ireland effect.” Ireland's apparently superior position in terms of independence and non-dependence (with an index of 0.40) is essentially due to the fact that many major American companies are based in Ireland due to tax advantages granted by the Irish government. If Ireland is excluded from the calculations, the European trade balance in the digital services sector for the period between 2022 and 2024 will shift from achieving a surplus to a huge deficit of about 350 billion US dollars.
