EC: Europe lags behind with digital agenda targets

While Europeans are “very open” to digital technologies, governments and companies in the industry fail to keep up with them, according to Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, upon the publication of the Digital Agenda Scoreboard.

The European economy is still attached to economic models and the political thinking of the 20th century. “If we do not take action, Europe will lag behind competition at international level,”  warned Kroes.

Soaring consumption of data and the transition to mobile technologies, facilitated by smartphones, and to mobile services such as internet 3G, music and webmail streaming, are the most important trends in the ITC domain which represents at the moment 6 percent of the GDP in the European Union, and provides over 8 million work places.

Positives:

• Broadband connections are nearly omnipresent in Europe– 95 percent of Europeans have access to a fixed broadband connection

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• Consumers and companies are rapidly adopting mobile services– mobile internet has seen a 62 percent growth, reaching 217 million postpay contracts for mobile broadband services

• 15 million Europeans were connected to the internet for the first time in 2011, 68 percent of Europeans go online with regularity while 170 million use social networks.

• Greece, Portugal and Ireland have adopted eGoverning services

Limitations:

• Half of the labor force in Europe does not still have enough competencies in the ITC to find or change a workplace. While 43 percent of the EU population have middle to higher internet competencies, nearly half of the labor force does not think their abilities in using the computer and internet are sufficient to ensure them a work place on the labor market. Nearly 25 percent do not have any competencies in ITC at all. Given this context, filling positions in ITC has become a problem, as the number of available workplaces by 2015 is expected to count 700,000.

• Online purchases continue to represent a limited activity at national level. While 58 percent of internet users buy online, only one in ten has used an e-commerce website from another member state. What stands in the way are the language barrier and the red tape.

• SMEs no longer use e-commerce. Most SMEs no longer buy or sell online, setting a limit to exports and the possibility to make revenues

• Investments in research continue to be smaller than those of the competition. The ITC sector in the EU stands currently at less than half of the intensity of R&D of the ITC sector in the USA.

• Telecom companies continue to impose on consumers very high tariffs for data roaming. On average, consumers pay tariffs that are three and half times higher than what they pay for national calls.