nations compete for capital, investment, knowledge, and innovation at a time when change happens at the speed of a tweet.
Perhaps the biggest or most shocking anomaly is Russia’s poor showing, being ranked 47th out of the 67 countries on the list. Russia does poorly across all metrics, with low scores on smartphone penetration as well as digital competitiveness. In fact, Ukraine is ranked two slots above Russia despite having a GDP 14 times smaller. Perhaps this is because Ukraine long served as a technological hub of the former USSR and currently structures its education and business interests towards promoting its information technology sector.
Some of the rankings are less surprising. Every one of the top 20 countries has a developed economy and European countries with advanced economies lead the pack, making up four of the top five most technologically advanced. However, Asian countries including the U.A.E, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea are all in the top 12, giving the top players in the global tech race a measure .
After compiling the data, 37 countries had data filled in for all four metrics, 30 countries had data filled in for three metrics, and 36 countries had data filled in for two metrics. Once we obtained this raw data, we used statistical tools to equally weight all four variables. We did this by ensuring that the standard error of all the variables are equal. After that, we did a simple equation of adding up all the scores. This provided us a range where a 4 represents the highest technological strength and 0 means the absolute lowest.
We decided to only use countries that had data filled in for three metrics or more to ensure accurate analysis. For the countries with only three metrics, we used linear regression analysis to predict and fill in the missing metric. We did not do this for countries with only two metrics because the margin of error would have been too large.
