Andrus Ansip, the European Commission’s vice-president for the Digital Single Market, is leading the push to introduce a wide range of reforms designed to accelerate the continent's embrace of technology and startups.
In Brussels today, Ansip gave a speech designed to build support for these new measures. But in doing so, he provided a list of ways Europe is failing to fully embrace a digital future. Here are five:
1. Existing barriers to shopping online across borders within Europe currently limit where and how citizens can purchase digital goods and services. Ansip said this is costing consumers almost $13 billion every year in higher costs.
2. According to Ansip, EU companies have been slow to adopt new digital and technology and communications: "Only 1.7 percent of EU companies make full use of such technology, while 41 percent say they are not using any of them," he said.
3. The governments of EU member nations are also making uneven progress toward adopting tech. Ansip said if governments were using digital-first approaches for paperwork such as invoices and procurement, they could be saving almost $20 billion annually.
4. Europe is also not doing enough to train the digital workers it will need in the coming years. Ansip estimates that by 2020, Europe will face a shortage of more than 800,000 IT workers.
5. Finally, too many people in Europe are still not online. "Nearly 20 percent of Europeans have never used the internet," Ansip said.
Source: European Commission