A SCIENTIFIC AND METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH TO ASSESSING BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT DIGITALISATION IN EU COUNTRIES AS A DETERMINANT OF INVESTMENT ATTRACTIVENESS

Abstract

The relevance of the study stems from the growing role of digital factors in shaping the competitive advantages of national economies and from the uneven capacity of EU Member States to convert digital potential into sustainable investment outcomes. Differences in the development of digital infrastructure, the security of online interactions, the capacity of digital markets, the international integration of the ICT sector, and technological performance necessitate a comprehensive assessment of business environment digitalisation in relation to the institutional, macroeconomic, market-structural, and financial dimensions of investment attractiveness. The study aims to refine a scientific and methodological approach to assessing business environment digitalisation in EU countries and to identify models of its interaction with composite investment attractiveness and its structural components. The empirical analysis is based on data for 27 EU Member States for the period 2015-2024. The methodological framework combines the normalisation and aggregation of five digital development indicators, the calculation of a composite business environment digitalisation index, the spatial positioning of countries, Pearson correlation analysis, and the estimation of the aggregate correlation sensitivity of the structural components of investment attractiveness. The findings reveal substantial differentiation in the digital profiles of EU countries and the absence of a directly proportional relationship between the achieved level of digitalisation and composite investment attractiveness. Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Ireland recorded the highest values of the digitalisation index; however, their investment positions differ in terms of the alignment between digital change and other components of the economic environment. The correlation analysis shows that the regulatory-institutional and market-structural components more frequently moved in the same direction as digitalisation, whereas macroeconomic stability displayed heterogeneous relationships and investment-financial infrastructure produced the most polarised distribution. Comparing the correlation between digitalisation and investment attractiveness with aggregate correlation sensitivity provided the basis for distinguishing synergistic, compensatory, imbalanced, and inverse models of digital-investment interaction. The practical value of the findings lies in the potential application of the proposed approach to diagnosing structural constraints on the realisation of digital advantages, comparing national trajectories of digital-investment development, and substantiating differentiated measures of digital, investment, and structural policy across EU Member States.