The pandemic has forced rapid digitalization all around the world: Schools have transformed to support online learning, many jobs have become entirely remote, and automation has accelerated in a wide array of industries. In addition, many countries have established digital systems for contact tracing, Covid-19 testing, government relief distribution, and vaccination rollouts (albeit with mixed results). This digital growth has demonstrated the tremendous capacity for technology to add value to our society, but it has also revealed how fragile these tools — and people’s trust in those tools — can be.
How Digital Trust Varies Around the World
As economies around the world digitalize rapidly in response to the pandemic, one component that can sometimes get left behind is user trust. What does it take to build out a digital ecosystem that users will feel comfortable actually using? To answer this question, the authors explored four components of digital trust: the security of an economy’s digital environment; the quality of the digital user experience; the extent to which users report trust in their digital environment; and the extent to which users actually use the digital tools available to them. They then used almost 200 indicators to rank 42 global economies on their performance in each of these four metrics, finding a number of interesting trends around how different economies have developed mechanisms for engendering trust, as well as how different types of trust do — or don’t — correspond to other digital development metrics.