The Link between the European Cultural Index, Digitization, Economic Growth, and Development

Progress is determined by a multitude of factors, including culture and digitization. We set out to determine and analyze the European Cultural Index (ECI), which highlights the economic role of culture under conditions of digitization. Using data for the period 2010–2019, we applied the PCA (Principal Component Analysis) method and, for robustness, OLS regression. European countries have implemented digitization in the cultural sector, but not uniformly. The developed ones have an increased capacity to assimilate digitization. The ECI is an index with two dimensions, one cultural and one digital, whose average values divide the European states into four groups: the leaders in the digitization of the cultural sector (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain), those with a digitized cultural sector (Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Finland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Austria), those with a weakly digitized cultural sector (Czech Republic, Ireland, Estonia, Hungary), and those with a very weakly digitized cultural sector (Slovenia, Malta, Slovakia, Portugal, Latvia, Cyprus, Croatia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria). Traditional factors of cultural sector development positively and significantly influence ECI. Digital factors have the same influence, except for the use of digital technology for telephony and video calls, which proves that digitization supports the cultural sector if used constructively.