Arianne Dumayas (p)

Krisztina Varró

The Philippines remains to be one of the top destination for Information Technology and business process outsourcing(IT-BPO) investments. Despite the global economic downturn brought about by Covid-19 pandemic, the IT-BPO industry in the Philippines was able to deliver 26-billion-dollar revenue and grew by 1.4-1.8 percent in 2020. IT-BPO firms were initially concentrated in Metro Manila, however, in recent years, many IT-BPO companies are expanding their operation throughout the country. In order to sustain the progress of the industry and to diffuse the growth to local economies, the government together with the private sector have identified 25 Digital Cities which have the potential to attract and host IT-BPO investments. This paper aims to examine the characteristics and analyze the competitiveness of the 25 Digital Cities both at the international and national level. This paper utilizes the Tholons Global Innovation Index to assess the competitiveness at the global level and Cities and Municipalities Competitiveness Index(CMCI) by Philippines National Competitiveness Council to evaluate the competitiveness of Digital Cities at the national level. This paper also presents relevant IT-BPO statistics and discusses key historical transformation in IT-BPO industry. The Digital Cities have varied characteristics in terms of population, location, and number of IT-BPO firms and employees. Cities such as Cebu, Davao, Santa Rosa, Bacolod, Iloilo, and Baguio are consistently listed in the Tholon’s Top 100 Outsourcing Destination since 2015. Majority of the Digital Cities also rank relatively high in CMCI ranking. Furthermore, majority of the Digital Cities have experienced significant improvement in specific areas such as local economy growth, gross sales of registered firms, employment, and productivity.

Lukas Haefner (p)

Arianne Dumayas

For many tasks digitalization requires reskilling measures. Traditionally, reskilling policies are based on industry-specific challenges and neglect considering regional conditions. Recently, there have been increasing calls to build and implement place-based reskilling policies. Such policies are designed according to the conditions in the targeted regions to reach a higher effectiveness compared to place-neutral policies. However, large parts of the basis for building place-based measures to cope with challenges from digitalization are missing. We know little about how and why digital competences are developed in different regions. In order to design targeted interventions, policy makers not only need to understand how digital competences differ between regions but also comprehend the key conditions that shape regional digital competences.
Addressing these gaps would also help to understand how digitalization affects regional economic disparities. While there is some evidence for socio-economic and demographic characteristics to play a role in shaping regional digitalization effects, little attention has been paid to digital competences. Digital competences comprise a multitude of hard and soft skills that are required in companies to seize opportunities and to avoid threats that digitalization brings. Digital competences in companies can be considered a necessary prerequisite in regions to seize desirable outcomes from digital opportunities and they might therefore be one important factor driving the effect of digitalization on regional disparities. However, there is almost no data on digital competences at a regional scale and there are enormous research gaps concerning their role in shaping regional economic implications of digitalization.
The aim of our contribution is to provide insights into regional differences concerning several aspects of digital competences in companies. We want to reveal key regional factors for the level of digital competence and want to understand how these regional conditions influence companies in building digital competences. We present our study, aimed at collecting data on digital competences in six German regions, which are differentiated in terms of relevant social and economic indicators. In our study we collect data from qualitative interviews with representatives from companies, mostly CEOs. To allow for interregional comparisons, in each region we focus on the same two branches. The insights gained from the interviews are aimed at supporting the elaboration of policies to foster digital competences in a spatially sensitive manner. Such policies may be needed not only to set up successful place-based reskilling measures but also to shape the regional outcomes of digitalization in a desirable way.

Ádám Szalai (p)

Lukas Haefner

see extended abstract

Krisztina Varró (p)

Ádám Szalai

The idea of ‘urban smartness’, referring broadly to the use of information and communication technologies for the improvement of urban management, has come to exert considerable influence on contemporary urban policymaking, and there is an expanding body of research discussing how the smart city imaginary has been translated into practice in different contexts. The widely shared starting point in this literature is that one should attend to the variety of logics, interests and power relations that give rise to situated social processes of smart urbanism. Yet, the smart city literature tends to be dominated by accounts of smart urbanism in the Global North and South. The proposed paper has the aim of exploring the distinctive political-economic dynamics and policy discourses shaping smart-city building in the Central Eastern European region. To this end, a case study of Hungary is discussed, based on extensive policy document analysis and interviews with key figures. As the paper will show, post-1990 state spatial restructuring and the uptake of globally mobile policy ideas, both mediated through processes of ‘Europeanization’, have run through and shaped Hungary’s existing smart urbanism as ‘common’ elements, as in other contexts. However, to come to grips with the state of smart urban development in this case, we need to attend to how these tendencies and processes have become entangled with the legacies of postsocialist urban planning, the specificities of Hungary’s historically conditioned state selectivity, as well as with centralizing trends of state-building.