Digitalization: WB region’s opportunity for faster EU integration

Event report

[Read more session reports and live updates from the 2nd Western Balkan Digital Summit]

Ms Ana Tozzi (Executive Director, Foreign Investors Council, Serbia) gave her presentation from the business point of view. She noted three important grounds: EU integration, digitalisation, and regional cohesion. Within these three, digitalisation helps optimise the whole process. It brings more transparency, consistency and efficiency, as well as minimises the risk of human error, such as corruption. For Western Balkans economies digitalisation can help resolve different challenges in order to meet the following EU criteria:

• political criteria (rule of law, protecting investor’s rights, e-judiciary)
• economic criteria (functional economy, able to sustain competitive pressure, e-commerce)
• institutional EU criteria (adopt, implement, enforce).                                              

When it comes to the digital transformation gap, data shows that Western Balkans economies are lagging behind.

She noted the following preconditions for faster EU integrations:

1. Political stability
2. Infrastructure development
3. Regulatory framework
4. People development

Key benefits for different stakeholders are the following:

• for the private sector: quicker market access, productivity increase, higher value employment, impact on economic inequalities
• for the public sector: transparency and consistency, streamlining and efficiency, better service to constituency and business, anti-corruption tool

Tozzi’s last slide showed the key conclusions which are that the gap between WB6 and EU is evident and the digitalisation can be a very useful tool.

By Aida Mahmutović