Abstract
The Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0 refers, in simple terms, to the way in which the technologies like artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, augmented reality and the internet of things are merging with the physical life of the people all around the globe. This new “era” is expected to transform in a revolutionary way the economies, employment and even the society in which we live today. The digital economy is very different in comparison to the traditional one and it is the result of the accelerated evolution of telecommunications, internet and electronics, and their integration in our everyday life. This arising economy is favoring the development of a new type of business, i.e. e-business. The process of the transformation of the actual economy in a digital one needs a set of favorable factors and a period of time, named period of transition. In this context, it is necessary to understand and to assess how advanced the transition process is in each EU country so that to be able to create and implement the suitable strategies who will lead to the digital economy. At EU level it was create an index - Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) – with the aim to measure the progress of EU countries towards a digital economy and society. Our paper presents this index and make a comparative analysis of its evolution during the last 5 years. The results show an intense preoccupation of all EU countries for the improvement of the sectors considered in the calculation of DESI and the progress made by some states in this field.
Highlights
We are witnesses of a radical transformation of our society with an incredible speed, which change the face of almost everything: industry and technology, economy, society, the way of thinking and making decisions
It is necessary to understand and to assess how advanced the transition process is in each EU country so that to be able to create and implement the suitable strategies who will lead to the digital economy
The economic field is deeply influenced by the digital age, in the sense that, it began to modernize through the development of production technologies, it came to create a new way of carrying out the production activity through smart factories, improved and expanded the service sector, formulated new business models, brought profitability, added a new market, the one specific to e-commerce, etc
Summary
We are witnesses of a radical transformation of our society with an incredible speed, which change the face of almost everything: industry and technology, economy, society, the way of thinking and making decisions. Industry 4.0 – the Forth Industrial Revolution The concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, called Industry 4.0, was first defined and explained in the book “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” in 2016, by the founder of the World Economic Forum - Klaus Schwab He best described the phenomenon of the new revolution: of the many diverse and fascinating challenges we face today, the most intense and important is how to understand and apply the new technological revolution, which involves a transformation of humanity. Schwab has provided unlimited possibilities to have billions of people connected via mobile devices, giving rise to unprecedented processing power, storage capacity and access to knowledge He named the confluence of several major and startling emerging technological discoveries, covering large-scale fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology materials science, energy storage and quantum computing [1]. It is a dynamic and on-going process, there were identified and defined the supporting pillars of Industry 4.0 (Table 1)
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