Education Expenditures as a Factor in Bridging the Gap at the Level of Digitalization

Digitalization is an integral human development process that will eventually encompass all economic and social processes. The level of readiness to implement the digital age achievements among the countries of the world is different. In this regard, the study of factors that contribute to the process of digitalization becomes especially relevant. This work proposed to consider the educational component as such a factor, namely its state funding. To do this, the author offers to conduct a cluster analysis (hierarchical Word method) in two stages: based on Digital Readiness Index components separately and together with the expenditures on education. For this purpose, the Stata 12 software package was used to process data from 36 countries of Eastern and Western Europe based on analytical materials from the Cisco company, the World Bank database. The results confirmed that the education expenditures significantly change countries' distribution in terms of readiness for digitalization and form the basis for further research in this area.