Data-Driven Management as a Factor of Enterprise Competitiveness in the Digital Economy

Abstract

The article examines the readiness of the business environment in Ukraine and four EU countries – Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and Estonia – for Data-Driven management and its association with macroeconomic competitiveness indicators. The relevance of the study is determined by the growing gap between the volumes of generated data and the ability of enterprises to use them for informed decision-making, as well as by Ukraine's unique context – the destruction of digital infrastructure due to the war and the simultaneous pursuit of European integration. A composite Data-Driven Readiness (DDR) index is constructed, aggregating five normalized digital development indicators (internet user penetration, fixed broadband density, secure internet servers, R&D expenditure, and ICT service exports) with equal weights using panel data for 2014–2024 (55 observations). The analytical tools include comparative country profiling, Spearman rank correlation, and panel regression with country and year fixed effects. The study finds that all five countries improved their digital readiness over the period, albeit at varying rates: Estonia maintained its leadership (DDR = 0.843 in 2024), Romania demonstrated the largest absolute gain (+0.473), while Ukraine's growth (from 0.092 to 0.422) effectively stalled in 2023–2024 due to war-related infrastructure destruction and a decline in R&D expenditure to 0.37% of GDP. Correlation analysis confirmed a stable association between the DDR index and labor productivity (ρ = 0.745). The strongest productivity correlates are infrastructure prerequisites for data-driven management — secure server density (ρ = 0.780) and internet penetration (ρ = 0.713). Analysis of Ukraine's gap relative to the Estonian benchmark revealed critical deficits in data security infrastructure (7% of Estonia's level) and R&D expenditure (20%). Recommendations are formulated for phased implementation of data-driven management at the enterprise level in line with analytics maturity stages and for prioritizing digitalization policy in the context of EU integration and postwar recovery.