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A pan-European macroeconomic study titled “Big and open data In Europe: A growth engine or a missed opportunity?’ analyses how technologies have the potential to influence various aspects of the European society, about their substantial, long term impact on our wealth and quality of lifelife, but also about the new developmental challenges for the EU as a whole – as well as for its member states and their regions.
The report, created by the Warsaw Institute for Economic Studies (WISE), contains a prognosis for the 28 countries from the EU about the impact of big and open data from 2020 and its additional output and how it will affect trade, health, manufacturing, information and communication, finance & insurance and public administration in different regions. It foresees that the EU economy will grow by 1.9% by 2020 thanks to big and open data and describes the increase of the general GDP level by countries and sectors.
One of the many interesting findings of the report is that the positive impact of the data revolution will be felt more acutely in Northern Europe, while most of the New Member States and Southern European economies will benefit significantly less, with two notable exceptions being the Czech Republic and Poland. If you would like to have first-hand up-to-date information about the impact of big and open data on the future of Europe.
Abstract
In this paper we discuss the economic potential of the current phase of the ICT revolution in Europe. We argue that a logical consequence of the exponential improvements in the computational power of integrated circuits and data storage capacities observed since the late 1960s, finds logical prolongation in the form of Big and Open data revolution. We support the view that ICT together with Big and Open data solutions reveal many features of General Purpose Technologies, and as such, have strong influence on the entire world economic system. We focus our quantitative analysis on Europe and with the help of a dedicated, bottom-up, macroeconomic model, which we call BOUDICA, we are able to estimate the economic potential of Big and Open data in all 28 EU member states. Moreover, we decompose the overall effect (estimated at 1.9% of EU-28 GDP by 2020) into 21 sectors and 28 countries showing that three parts of Europe ‘“ North, South and East ‘“ may benefit from the current technological trends in ICT differently. We argue that this divergent potential should be associated with different sectoral and structural bases of national economies in Europe, including different levels of innovativeness and vertical integration within particular sectors. At the end of the paper we thoroughly discuss policy implications of the major economic observations made in the article, pointing out the weaknesses and strengths of European industrial, competitive and science policy with respect to the Big and Open data challenge.