| Summary: | Taking advantage of the 'information revolution' is a priority in various national development strategies. Eager to tap into economic and social opportunities potentially afforded by increased access to digital information, many governments of developing countries have envisioned policies that guide their transformation into so-called 'knowledge economies'. However, despite its importance to contemporary economic development, the concept itself is rarely clearly defined, operationalised, or effectively measured. The few indices that have measured the state of knowledge and information economies around the world employ significantly different sets of variables from one another, further adding to the vagueness of the concept. These indices rely on the accuracy and cross-sectional as well as longitudinal representativeness of their data sources, which can be called into question in low-income contexts. We thus propose the construction of a Digital Knowledge Economy Index, which will additionally account for capacities and skills that are quantifiable via measuring content-creation and participation directly through digital platforms, such as the code-sharing platform GitHub, encyclopaedia Wikipedia and domain name registrations. With this approach, conventional data sources - national statistics and expert surveys - can be complemented by data that is collected via the internet and that reflects the underlying digital content creation, capacities and skills of the population. An index that combines traditional and novel data sources may provide a more revealing view of the status of the world's digital knowledge economy and highlight where the availability of digital resources may actually reinforce inequalities in the age of data.
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