A reduced Composite Indicator for Digital Divide measurement at the regional level: An application to the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI)

The present paper investigates the problem of defining an easy-to-implement tool to evaluate the Digital Divide (DD) among and, above all, within countries to grasp sub-national divides and appropriately inform policy-makers guiding digital transformation processes. With this aim in mind, the study focuses on the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), the most recent and currently used CI for DD measurement across European states. A methodology employing correlation and principal component analysis is adopted to assess redundancies in the DESI and obtain a reduced version of the index with a significantly lower number of indicators. Experiments performed using the 2020 data related to the 29 EU countries demonstrate that the reduced DESI produces very similar results to the original one, thus proving the existence of redundancies in its current structure. An extensive analysis of the Italian case shows how the reduced version of the index can be more easily applied at the sub-national level, thus helping to detect DD between regions and offering meaningful policy-making support. In particular, a framework to analyze the obtained results is proposed to support the identification of adequate interventions at the national level or targeted actions to mitigate digital disparities in lagging regions.