World Digital Competitiveness Ranking 2022, Denmark Tops the List as the Most Digitally Competitive Economy in the World 2022

Now in its sixth year, the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking, produced by the IMD World Competitiveness Center, measures the capacity and readiness of 63 economies to adopt and explore digital technologies as a key driver for economic transformation in business, government and wider society.

Based on a mixture of hard data and survey replies from business and government executives, the digital rankings help governments and companies to understand where to focus their resources and what might be best practices when embarking on digital transformation.

Denmark took the top position in the digital rankings and the United States fell to second place (it has previously held on to the number one place for the four years prior). Denmark rose to first place due to its outstanding performance in future readiness – or its preparedness to exploit digital transformation – coming first in business agility and IT integration.

This year 54 criteria were measured – a mixture of external hard data and the IMD Executive Opinion Survey – and arranged into three major groups: future readiness, knowledge and technology.

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Denmark’s top ranking is in large part due to an outstanding performance in future readiness: defined by the WCC as “the level of country preparedness to exploit digital transformation”. Denmark comes out top of the group in business agility as well as IT integration and ranks number 5 globally on adaptive attitudes.

A major finding in the 2022 edition of the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking show that governments and the private sector need to shield their digital infrastructure from cyber-attacks if they want to continue in the race for digitally competitive economies. This concern goes into the category of future readiness by which Denmark performs particularly well.

Denmark has outperformed the US, who had to settle for second place. Other top-ranking nations include Sweden (3rd), Singapore (4th), and Switzerland (5th).

“Switzerland is on its way to becoming a fully developed digital nation, with satisfactory digital infrastructure and regulation, data governance and digital attitudes. A key success factor for the future though will be the introduction of a digital identity program in the country. The top nations in the ranking, such as Denmark and Singapore, are already marking the way in this sense,” said Professor Arturo Bris, Director of IMD World Competitiveness Center.

IMD World Digital Competitiveness Rankings in the past five years