Socioeconomic structure

Overview: The innovative concept underlying all the technological breakthroughs related to the Digital Revolution is digitalization. Given the pervasive nature of digitalization, a multidimensional approach is needed that not only focuses on economic or technological dimensions alone, but also accounts for their interconnectedness and includes the societal aspect. Task 2 deals with the framework conditions of production and investigates the readiness of Austria in comparison to other economies regarding technological transformation processes from a broad socioeconomic perspective.

Objectives:

• Develop a framework that allows studying to what extent the building blocks of the socioeconomic system change in response to technological change and how these building blocks affect themselves the trajectory of the technology
• Derive measures to assess the readiness of countries regarding the Digital Revolution, and the evolution of both their socioeconomic structure and performance
• Deduct characteristic and/or region-specific features of techno-economic transformation, with special emphasis on small open, knowledge-based economies

The methodological framework is rooted in network and graph theory as well as input-output modeling, combined with statistical tools for data preparation (data imputation, sensitivity analysis) and data analysis (e.g. distribution dynamics by means of Markov chains and Kernel density estimations).