1. Presentation

For the third consecutive year, the DESI of the Basque Country is presented. This report, which follows a format very similar to last year's, submits in a structured way the results obtained for the final index as well as for its intermediate levels. These values compare the relative position of the Basque Country with those of the other Member States of the European Union. Besides the updated data for 2019, and as in the previous report, it also shows the evolution of all the indicators over the last three years, so that it is possible to analyse the progress and setbacks since 2017.

DESI 2019 maintains the same five dimensions of past years: connectivity, human capital, use of Internet services, integration of digital technology and digital public services. The distribution of weights of each dimension with respect to the final indicator does not vary either (connectivity counts for 25%, human capital another 25%, the use of Internet services 15%, the integration of digital technology 20% and digital public services 15%). The sub-dimensions are also preserved, although with modifications in some of their denominations. The main changes occur at the level of indicators, especially with the incorporation of new ones, in all dimensions. Thus, the DESI goes from thirty-three to a total of forty-four indicators. This implies that, for intertemporal comparative, it has been necessary to recalculate the DESI 2017 and DESI 2018 indexes, applying such methodological changes.

A new second European digital indicator has been included in this report, the Women in Digital (WiD) index. This index, also produced by the European Commission, helps measuring and monitoring women's participation in the digital economy and society. As with the DESI, from the WiD index a diagnosis of the performance of European Union countries is obtained that allows for comparative and classification. Besides the result that reflects the greater or lesser representation of women in the digital environment at a given time, the final objective of having a robust and systematic measurement method, such as this index, seeks to assess the extent to which the efforts that are being made succeed in having an effect in reducing the persistent gender gap that, is already known to exist, and that must be combated with the promotion of an increasing inclusion of women in the digital environment.

The WiD index is composed of thirteen indicators grouped into three dimensions: Internet use, Internet user skills and specialist skills and employment. Unlike the DESI, in the WiD index there is no intermediate level of sub-dimensions, but the calculation method, with the processes of normalization and weightings from the absolute value of the indicator to the final index, is analogous. In the case of the WiD index, the weight of each dimension is equal (33.33%).

The structure of the DESI and WiD analyses in this report is the same, starting from the final result of the index, then moving on to the dimensions, then to the sub-dimensions (or directly to the indicators in the case of WiD) and finally to the indicators (in the case of DESI). Results at the dimensional level are presented in graphs while, for the sub-dimensional and indicator levels, the information is more detailed and synthesized in tables.

The following section shows the evolutionary comparative of these indexes, between 2017 and 2019 for the DESI and between 2018 and 2019 for the WiD. In addition, the WiD includes a gender comparative based on the calculation of differentials between women and men data for the Basque Country, Spain and the EU-28 average.