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📰Is Europe Declining? - Story of the week
European nations comprise 18 of the top 25 spots in the IDCA Digital Readiness Index 2026, which has just been released. Correlating the development of Digital Economies with these rankings, IDCA finds these nations now benefit from having 19 and 25 percent of their GDPs be classified as a Digital Economy, in comparison to the world average of 17 percent.
Yet, across the ocean, the US administration publicly and frequently describes Europe as “declining,” citing more robust growth rates in the US when compared to Europe over the past 20 years, clear leadership in innovation and entrepreneurialism, and growing leadership in the hot tech topic of today, AI. Can these apparently opposing points of view be reconciled? The first point to address is the data-driven nature of IDCAs research in contrast o the political statements of any administration. Yet even though the US position is indeed political, it is largely a function of GDP growth. In that respect, the US has been exceeding Europe on an annual basis for many years. Thus, today average per-person income in the US stands are more than $80,000, compared to around $60,000 for the wealthiest European nations. (This data point does not consider a small number of small European nations with distorted income levels stemming from outlier accounting processes.) But there is much more to a society than pure income. The IDCA analysis factors in relative income distribution, relative development and achievements of education and health care, the amount of perceived corruption, and relative internet development, access, and speed. Abstracting and boiling down data sets from more than 200 factors into a single result shows how many European countries are currently leading the US in relative Digital Readiness development, often by a wide margin.
It's essential to note that the Index shows where things stand. It does not make projections into the future. But the underlying data can be viewed to at least take a glimpse; doing this shows that many European nations are reaching, or have already exceeded, the point in which power consumption is a big concern. Power consumption is a big concern in the US, too, in selected regions, but not throughout the entire, massive country. In Europe, though, these concerns are real in the large countries of Germany ahd the UK, and in the smaller countries of Ireland, Denmark, and the Netherlands.
There is also potential for enormous expansion in France and some smaller to mid-size European nations such as Slovenia and Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania, and a few others.
So an overall, nuanced picture created from IDCA's data shows that Europe leads the US in Digital Readiness, that it faces larger concerns about electricity, and that there are bright spots along with gloomy ones. Larger concerns can be raised about Europe's ability to achieve the quantum leaps in power and digital infrastructure that's required for global AI leadership. If it cannot, then it will start to lag in more than just simple GDP.
The US appears able to achieve such a leap, thus fueling optimism from AI developers and investors.
It is thus critical to watch both regions closely to see whether they, in fact, represent leadership or decline over the longer term.
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