18/6/19: OECD-led Tax Reforms: A Prescription for a Less Competitive Economy

I have just posted a draft of my paper on the OECD BEPS proposals from May-June 2019 here: Gurdgiev, Constantin, OECD-led Tax Reforms: A Prescription for a Less Competitive Economy (June 18, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3406260. 

1/11/15: Digital City Index: What's Up With Dublin?..

Digital City Index ranks European cities in terms of their ecosystem ability to sustain digital entrepreneurship.

Full data and rankings are accessible here: https://digitalcityindex.eu/downloads.

While one can be sceptical in looking at the data, there are several things jumping out when it comes to Dublin ranking.

1. Overall ranking for the city is 8th. Not too bad, but not too great either, especially given the hoopla usually accompanies our self promotion as the world's leading tech hub.
2. In Access to Capital terms, we rank 11th. Not great either.
3. In Business Environment - 17th - oh dear...
4. In Digital Infrastructure - 27th... no comment necessary
5. In Skills - 10th. Again, respectable, but surely not exactly world's most educated workforce thingy...
6. In Entrepreneurial Culture - third.  Which is great and suggests that it is not our enterprising that is poor, but the supports systems and institutions. Guess which bit is the remit of our policymakers?
7. In Knowledge Spillovers we ranked 14th. Recall all the talk about the alleged great benefit from the MNCs in terms of knowledge spillovers? Spot it anywhere in these figures?
8. Lifestyle - a proxy for quality of life, that is cost-adjusted... well 26th we are. Great place to attract top notch human capital to.
9. Dublin Market system is 9th ranked - respectable.
10. We rank excellent 3rd in terms of Mentoring & Managerial Assistance. 
11. We rank 21st in terms of Non-Digital Infrastructure. No comment here.

So, overall, let's cut the hype and start facing the music, shall we? We are - by some distance - not ranked as the best place to start digital business in Europe. No matter how many posters saying otherwise we plaster on the walls of Dublin Airport.

30/10/15: 'Internet Natives': Power of Value Creation + Power of Value Destruction

A very interesting Credit Suisse survey of some 1,000 people of the tail end of the millennial generation (age 16-25) across the U.S., Brazil, Singapore and Switzerland. Some surprising insights.

Take a look at the following summary:

The results are seriously strange. Around 48% of all respondents use internet for payments transactions, but only 19% on average use it for obtaining financial advice. In other words, convenience drives transactions use, but not analytics demand.

Meanwhile, on average just 20% use internet for earning money or working. Which makes you wonder, what jobs (if any) do the respondents hold if only 1 in 5 use internet to execute it? And, furthermore, look at the percentages of respondents who use internet for job searches compared to earning money or working. Once again, something fishy.

Internet use for political and social engagement heavily exceeds personal relations. And this is true for all countries surveyed. Which simply does not bear any relationship to young generation voting participation in the real world, but does match their responses to whether or not they use internet for voting.


While responses across previous set of questions suggest that internet-based social (political / civic) engagements are more prevalent amongst the young respondents than personal engagements, there is the opposite view of internet as bearing personal benefits as opposed to social benefits.

This is especially true in the U.S. and Switzerland, where the gap between those who think internet is a positive personal platform as opposed to social platform is 12-13 percentage points.

Confusing? May be not. The ‘web naturals’ that we all are, we are simultaneously experiencing two aspect of internet-enabled life:

• Too much information and clutter; and
• Significant value to the power of engagement.

What this means to me is that social and interactive platforms have to stop inventing new channels to push through to us - information users - commercialised crap and start letting us take charge of content once again. To do this, the successful platforms of the future will need the following:
1) Own brand capital that is clean from being pure advertisement pushers;
2) More creative and empowering deployment of user-generated content; and
3) Ability to re-focus their business strategies on margin delivery.

Otherwise, they will end up cannibalising themselves and destroying our - users’ - value.

12/5/15: Behold the Digital (Paper) worth EUR415 billion

Yes, EU has a new proposal for a new White Elephant, named Digital Strategy and costed at EUR415 billion: https://euobserver.com/digital/128602...

And yes, unveiling it, the forward-looking modernist commissioner for everything Digital had to carry into the hearing a pile of... papers...

You can't make this up... but you can (if you are an EU Commissioner) make up a EUR415 billion new 'Lisbon Agenda'... this time for a Digital Union... to out digitalise every other Digital Economy in the world... using pencils and binders...

5/9/2013: IBM: 64% of global CMOs want to approach customers as individuals

Since 2009, IBM Institute for Business Value has been surveying C-level executives around the world to  assess the development of digital economy.

Recently, IBM released some headline numbers for the forthcoming (October) survey for 2013:

• 64% of CMOs want to approach customers as individuals
• 71% of CIOs see communication moving towards more social/digital collaboration
• Majority (55%) of CHROs foresee increasing organisational openness
• Just 34% of organisations have an in-depth understanding of their customers
• But 78% expect their organisations to have an in-depth understanding of their customers by 2017
• Only 1 in 5 organisations has the capacity to use Big Data with just 40% intergating internal and external data sources, just 18% using Big Data to identify new products and services
• 77% of all CFOs support products and services innovation

Handy info graphic (you can click on it to enlarge):

Economics 1/7/10: Finland - Broadband access is a universal right

An interesting follow up to our Digital Economy Rankings 2010 released jointly by EIU and IBM's Institute for Business Value earlier this week (see here for global results and here for detailed data on Ireland).

Finland - ranked 4th in the world this year by DER2010 - has just announced that its residents will have the legal right to broadband access. A law passed in October 2009 came into force today requiring all telecomms providers to offer 24/7-on high-speed internet connections to all of the country's 5.3 million residents. A minimum speed of at least 1 megabit per second must be guaranteed.

For comparison,

Finland achieved the following scores in Connectivity and Technology Infrastructure category (relating to quality and supply of broadband):

• Overall Connectivity & Technology Infrastructure score = 8.0/10.0
• Broadband penetration = 7.0
• Broadband quality = 1.0
• Broadband affordability = 9.0
• Internet user penetration = 9.0
• International internet bandwidth = 10.0
• Internet security = 10.0

In comparison, Ireland scores, relating to broadband) in this category were:

• Overall Connectivity & Technology Infrastructure score = 7.20/10.0
• Broadband penetration = 5.0
• Broadband quality = 1.0
• Broadband affordability = 9.0
• Internet user penetration = 7.0
• International internet bandwidth = 10.0
• Internet security = 10.0

Spot the difference?

Economics 29/06/2010: Digital economy rankings 2010: Ireland details

Updated: here is the link to the actual report.

Ireland results, as promised.

High level stuff first:
Good move - 1 rank improvement overall, improvements in 3 sub-categories, but slipping in 3 other.

Compared to peers:
Note: New Zealand has shown remarkable consistent gains over the last 10 years, moving to top 10 position this year for the first time.

Next, consider all categories changes in the case of Ireland:
Very strong across the board, offset by significant deterioration in connectivity and technology infrastructure score (driven by new measurements of quality of broadband and mobile communications introduced in this year's rankings). Weak performance in consumer & business adoption - primarily on the back of economic crisis. Also weak performance in social & cultural environment, driven by education system shortcomings.

So to summarize:

• Ireland ranks 17th in connectivity & technology infrastructure, though broadband penetration remains low
• Ireland ranks 17th in business environment in tough market conditions
• Ireland ranks 17th in social & cultural environment despite low innovation scores compared to regional average
• Ireland ranks 22nd in legal environment, the main detractor is electronic ID implementation
• Ireland is in 21st place on Government policy & vision, the major challenge is in ICT spend
• Ireland is doing well and placed at 8th in consumer & business adoption
• Ireland has the lowest score drop in Western Europe from last year, which is only -0.02 (7.84 to 7.82)
• Ireland moved 1 rank up overall compared to 2009 (18 to 17), consumer & business adoption moved 4 ranks up and social & cultural environment up by 3 ranks
• Ireland has made a lot of progress in Government policy & vision scoring 8.40 and up 6 ranks, the progress is highest (+1.10) of all in Western Europe
• Broadband quality and affordability the weakest of connectivity category, scoring low on the quality and drop in affordability measurement
  

Economics 29/06/2010: EIU/IBM report on e-readiness

Global Digital Economy 2010 rankings are being launched today by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and IBM's Institute for Business Value. Here are some early results - I will be blogging on more in-depth analysis over the next few days.

Global Top 10:
Sources: all charts and tables are from IBM analysis of EIU/IBM e-readiness rankings, 2010.

Western Europe results:

• Overall, regional digital economy score declined in 2010 – from 7.86 in 2009 to 7.70 this year
• The biggest score decline this year in the connectivity & technology infrastructure (-0.99), which is highest drop of all regions
• Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Spain are up in their overall ranks compared to last year
• The strength lies in all categories being at the top of all regional averages. Also, Western Europe average is higher than Major markets. The score increased for business environment (+0.20) & Govt policy (+0.18) from last year
• Western Europe dropped in all other 4 categories compared to last year (Connectivity, Social environment, Legal environment and Consumer & business adoption)
  

Note that Western Europe leads the rest of the world in terms of regional scores. This, however, in part is due to the inclusion of three smaller economies in North American region: Bermuda, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago.
Clearly, there are two well-defined tiers in Western European regional grouping - countries that score between 1 and 12 globally (challenging top 10 positions in the world) and those lagging at around mid-20s and low 30s.


Ireland results to follow, so stay tuned.