The development of the European Union framework for the taxation of the digital economy: Evidence from selected member states

The analysis of the financial technologies introduction has proved that their application over-complicates the institutional structure of the global financial system. As a result, usual functional relationships cease to operate, new institutes and interdependencies appear, and systemic risks increase. In this context, the system instability increases, resulting in a transition to a new institutional status. The analysis of the financial technologies impact on the stability of financial system shows that the lack of institutional support for new financial technologies is the most important catalyst for the financial industry destabilization and the formation of financial bubbles in various market segments.
The ways to reduce the negative impact of financial technologies on the financial system stability (such as development of international prudential standards; revision of the licensing regime for financial companies; “regulatory sandboxes”, which test new technologies, business models and algorithms underlying the Fintech innovations; legal regulation of ownership of digital tokens; and clear definition of the blockchain technology in various areas of life, etc.) have been proposed.

The widespread use of information and communication technologies and subsequent transformations have led to the formation of a digital economy (DE). The European Union, as an international organization, has become the subject of building such an economy, striving to bring member countries closer in the field of digitalization.
The aim of this paper is to compare the DE development parameters of the EU countries based on cluster analysis and determine the most significant of them to solve the problems of bridging the digital divide between countries. For clustering, a feature DE vector of 20 indicators was created and the k-means algorithm and the Euclidean distance metric were used. For classification, the decision tree method was applied.
Three clusters of EU countries were identified by the level of DE development (leaders, followers and outsiders), which allowed assessing their positions relative to each other. Key parameters that determine countries’ positions in the general rating are identified. A parameter chart is generated to control the establishment of DE in the EU countries, which, in addition to key parameters, includes maximum, minimum and harmonic mean values of these parameters by cluster. This characterizes the landscape of DE development in the EU countries, assesses the digital divide and is the basis for decision-making in the area of bridging this divide.

In this work, the main trends in research and publication activity in digital transformation in the world and Ukraine are analyzed using meta- and bibliometric analysis. For this purpose, bibliometric data on scientific publications on the topic of digital transformations in the Google Scholar and Scopus databases were selected, which were additionally analyzed using the VOSviewer software package. Based on filtering the results obtained, an array was formed that included 366 scientific publications for 2019–2023 in Ukrainian in the Google Scholar database and 3,703 scientific publications in English for 2020–2023 in the Scopus database. Dynamic time analysis revealed a significant surge of scientific interest in the topic of digital transformations in recent years, while structural analysis revealed the multi-industry structure of existing research. The creation of bibliographic maps of keywords and publication maps allowed us to form an idea of the main thematic areas of research in the context of digital transformations and their opinion leaders. The data obtained became the basis for formulating recommendations for further areas of research in digital transformation, in particular, on the development of a unified roadmap for the digital transformation of education at different educational qualification levels and for various specialties. This will contribute to the formation of a single systemic approach to the digital transformation of Ukraine as a guarantee for the state’s sustainable development, well-being, strengthening of national security, speeding up the pace of European integration processes, as well as promoting national interests at the international level.