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THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
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connectivity. However, technical infrastructure is
only one of many factors that are important for
the development of a digital society. If the di-
mensions used in the DESI (EuropeanCommission
2017) are included – human capital, actual inter-
net use, integration of digital tech-nologies into
the economy and development of digital public
services (eGovernment) – then additional, often
very specific differences become apparent be-
tween the Member States. Overall, the data re-
veals the extent to which and the areas in which
Europe as a whole is still far from being advanced
in terms of digitalisation.
The fact that the digitalisation of the econo-
my – as well as the fostering of citizens’ digital
skills and the general development of human
capital – is key to increasing welfare and driving
the EU’s economic development becomes clear,
for instance, when examining the connection
between the level of integration of digital tech-
nologies and economic output as measured by
GDP per capita (see Chart 2). States with better
integration of digital technologies also tend to
have higher economic output and vice versa.
Closer examination of the development of
the states under survey in terms of DESI dimen-
sions shows the specific strengths of individual
countries, which can serve as best practice ex-
amples for other states if they are adjusted to
the conditions of the welfare state in each case.
While Sweden, for instance, is a leader in all di-
mensions and deemed to be a digitalisation pio-
neer, Estonia and Spain have clear strengths in
the area of e-government and e-administration,
and the United Kingdom and, again, Estonia are
strong when it comes to human capital and in-
ternet use. In general, it can be observed that
the least advanced areas are – with the excep-
tion of Sweden and to a lesser degree Germany
– the integration of digital technologies into the
economy (the core of Industry 4.0) and the
development of e-government across the EU
(see
Chart 2
). But what do the digitalisation
profiles of the seven states examined here look
like, and what are the countries̓ strengths and
weaknesses in specific policy areas?
Different Paths to welfare 4.0 – labour
and health
The increasing digitalisation of value-added net-
works and the greater use of new technologies,
flexible production processes and new work
forms is leading to changes in welfare state archi-
tectures. It tackles variuos policy fields, starting
with the labour market, over to education, sci-
ence and innovation up to health and social care.
The following short analysis covers two policy
areas that are strongly influenced by digitalisa-
tion and for which digitalisation offers strong in-
novation potential: labour and health-care.
Labour
As the central location for distributing life op-
portunities and social security in contemporary
capitalist market societies, the labour market is
affected by digitalisation and automatisation in
two ways: first, and as mentioned before, these
technological developments are drivers of struc-
tural change; and second, these developments
enable new ways to organize work which could
lead to a growing number of short hirings, zero-
hour contracts and other forms of labour-on-
demand (crowd- and cloud-work).
With the uprise of digitalisation and auto-
mation, artificial intelligence and robots, there
begins a downsize of a variety of routine tasks
that were traditionally done by humans. Famous
claims have been made that half of all jobs in