The Digital Economy Navigator 2025 shows how countries like Vietnam are converting connectivity into capability, highlighting economic strengths that GDP alone overlooks
In a school courtyard on the outskirts of Hanoi, students gather around their phones as a teacher streams the day’s lesson. Their connection, powered by a local 5G network, is faster than the fixed broadband serving many European homes. To traditional economists, Vietnam remains an emerging market. Yet in new digital-economy data, it represents something more dynamic: a country where capability and confidence are advancing faster than the tools long used to track prosperity.
We are measuring progress wrong because our tools were built for an era when productivity meant physical output, not digital participation. GDP remains the backbone of economic analysis, yet it tells only part of the story, capturing production but not how connectivity, skills, and trust transform that production.
That gap is what the Digital Economy Navigator 2025 (DEN 2025), developed by the Digital Cooperation Organization, aims to close. Built on 145 indicators across 80 economies covering 94 percent of global GDP, the Navigator measures how people and institutions convert connectivity into capability.
The DEN measures the breadth and depth of economic activity that is reliant on, significantly enhanced by, or enabled through, digital technologies and their applications. This holistic approach encompasses private sector services and goods delivered via digital channels; digital public sector operations; and societal uses of technology that boost human wellbeing or generate social and environmental benefits.
Its findings show that digitalization is now central to development: in South Asia and East Asia and the Pacific, broadband, skills training, and digital-government services are expanding faster than in many wealthier economies. In fact, internet access now reaches four in five people worldwide in the 80 countries covered by the DEN 2025.
Rethinking progress means recognizing that growth depends as much on distributed capability as on centralized production. A teacher using an e-learning platform, a small business trading online, or a government applying data to improve efficiency all contribute to productivity in ways traditional metrics only partly reflect. The Navigator shows such activity increasingly supports measurable growth in output and employment.
Yet progress remains uneven. Digital engagement has risen to about 70 percent globally, but only 3.1 per cent of female graduates specialize in Information and Communication Technology compared with 9.6 per cent for men. Artificial-intelligence investment is growing, yet most of it flows to high-income economies. These numbers remind us that capital alone does not determine digital strength, confidence and inclusion do.
Capability, inclusion, and sustainability together define modern productivity. The Navigator’s Digital for Sustainability pillar highlights how technology can cut emissions through smarter grids and circular-economy systems. A degree of global convergence is evident in energy efficiency and e-waste: South Asia is advanced, the MENAAP region is emerging, and other regions are at a transitioning maturity. In Brazil, for example, 89 per cent of electricity came from renewables in 2023—three times the global average—with solar power growing by 72 per cent in one year, and emissions falling to 38 per cent below their peak. Environmental efficiency is not separate from progress; it is part of how progress should be measured.
To measure opportunity effectively, economies need to consider capability, confidence, and connectivity as integral to national strength. Traditional indicators still matter, but they must be complemented by metrics that capture how people use technology to create value. Competitiveness now depends as much on participation and trust as on industrial output or trade. Recognising that balance is the first step toward measuring progress right.
In Hanoi, the students finish their lesson as evening falls. Their classroom exists in the cloud, their tools fit in their hands, and their aspirations reach beyond the indicators that once defined development. We are measuring progress wrong not because our numbers are flawed, but because our imagination is too narrow. The digital economy reminds us that progress is as much about participation as production.