Building a sustainable and innovative world in the digital age: A cross-country study

This paper investigates the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by a set of 75 countries from around the world. We apply a global digitalization index as the main explanatory (independent) variable and three additional variables: gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, Index of Economic Freedom, and population density. We apply correlation and regression analysis as a research method. Our main finding is that digitalization is generally positively correlated with sustainability and economic freedom, and negatively correlated with population density. Subsequently, we show that the situation differs for high-income countries, with GDP per capita above 20,000 USD, and low-income countries, with GDP per capita below 20,000 USD. In the former case, only digitalization is statistically significant at the 0.05 level. In the latter case, economic freedom is statistically nonsignificant, while GDP per capita, digitalization and population density are highly significant. These findings emphasize the critical role of digitalization in advancing global sustainability, and highlight variations based on economic contexts.