European Commission’s policy priorities include both digital and green transformations as key areas of interest, and are now being reinforced in the strategy designed to alleviate the consequences of the pandemic structured by the EU Next Generation Recovery Plan, the European Green Deal, and the EU’s Digital Decade.
To monitor the evolution of the European economy towards these objectives, the availability of data that allows the measurement of the progress in digitalisation and in environmental aspects is crucial.
The PREDICT Dataset focuses on one aspect of the digital transformation, namely the importance and development of the ICT, media content and retail sale via mail order houses or via internet sector.
The Twin Transition Dataset widens the scope with the inclusion of indicators of the digital transformation and R&D intensity in all industries of the economy, as well as information on environmental protection activities.
However, it not only includes ICT producing sectors, but also a detailed industry disaggregation (33 industries) so that the whole economy can be traced. Additionally, it includes a classification of each industry, according to the intensity of the impact of digital transformation within the sector.
One of the main advantages of the data is that the information is internally in accord with the PREDICT dataset, which follows the National Accounts framework and the guidelines set out in the Frascati Manual for R&D variables.
More precisely, the Twin Transition Dataset database is composed of two different thematic datasets: digitalisation and environment. The economic variables in each dataset are the following:
- Digitalisation
- Gross Value Added and Gross Output
- Employment and Hours Worked
- Labour productivity
- Business R&D Expenditure
- R&D personnel
- R&D researchers
- Gross Fixed Capital Formation
- Net capital Stock
- Environment
- Gross Value Added
- Gross Output
- Employment
- Labour productivity
Geographic coverage
The EU27 and its Member States, former EU28 aggregate (2013-2020) and United Kingdom. Additionally, the digitalisation dataset includes China and United States.
Taxonomies and classifications
The data complies with the statistical definitions, classifications and methods used to measure and compare the intensity of digitalisation across countries established by:
- “A taxonomy of digital intensive sectors” (Calvino et al. 2018).
- The revision of OECD digital taxonomy developed by Van Ark, de Vries and Erumban (2019) in “Productivity & Innovation Competencies in the Midst of the Digital Transformation Age: A EU-US Comparison”, along with the authors’ latest update in “How to not miss a productivity revival once again?” (Van Ark, de Vries and Erumban, 2020).