The DAI is a worldwide index that measures countries’ digital adoption across three dimensions of the economy: people, government, and business. The index covers 180 countries on a 0–1 scale, and emphasizes the “supply-side” of digital adoption to maximize coverage and simplify theoretical linkages. The overall DAI is the simple average of three sub-indexes. Each sub-index comprises technologies necessary for the respective agent to promote development in the digital era: increasing productivity and accelerating broad-based growth for business, expanding opportunities and improving welfare for people, and increasing the efficiency and accountability of service delivery for government. Originally constructed as part of the World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends, the DAI has been updated to reflect new data sources and an improved methodology. Two observations are available for most countries: 2014 (applying the updated data and methodology to the year covered in the original DAI dataset) and 2016 (the most recent year available). By measuring the relative adoption of digital technologies, DAI can assist policymakers in designing a digital strategy with tailored policies to promote digital adoption across different user groups.
Download (.xlsx) the long form of the DAI data.