Tracking Europeans’ interest in EC priorities using online search data
Between February 2020 and March 2021, the European Commission developed two flagship policy documents: the Communication Shaping Europe’s digital future and the Communication 2030 Digital Compass: the European way for the Digital Decade, both aimed at fast-forwarding the digitalisation of the European Union and its Member States, and constituting the backbone of the European Commission’s priority ‘A Europe fit for the digital age’. While the first document explores the vision and goals behind the Commission’s digital priority (technology that works for people; a fair and competitive economy; and an open, democratic and sustainable society), the 2030 Digital Compass provides a detailed overview of the actions needed to pursue four main objectives: i) a digitally skilled population and highly skilled digital professionals; ii) secure and performant sustainable digital infrastructures; iii) the digital transformation of businesses; iv) and digitalisation of public services. In this report, the second of a series of reports targeting the European Commission priorities, the JRC tries to explore Europeans’ interest around selected policy areas composing the digital priority. In particular, this report explores how Europeans’ interest evolves on three main areas touched upon by the digital priority: the availability and quality of infrastructure; the interest to develop skills to work, learn and to be contextaware in an increasingly digital world; and the changes in the way in which Europeans enrich themselves and relax using the digital medium for entertainment purposes. Each of the areas above is explored by a dedicated indicator or aggregation of indicators, representing selected topics made available by Google Trends, and characterising the concept being analysed. As in previous reports2, this work aims at making trends in Google Search data easier to explore and interpret, allowing for comparisons among countries and over time. While there are limitations in exploiting web searches to proxy the interests of Europeans, online search behaviour could provide insights on otherwise hardly measurable topics (such as the awareness of the citizens on a given topic) or topics in which coverage and frequency are lower (as in the case of survey data).