Which Country Has the Best Digital Well-Being in 2023?

The average person spends close to seven hours every day looking at a screen, whether for work, entertainment, or communication, highlighting how digital human life has become.

And just like how physical well-being differs from place to place, so too does digital well-being.

According to SurfShark’s 2023, Digital Quality of Life Index, some countries do a better job than others in providing accessible, and affordable internet and digital services, leading to better digital well-being.

They rank 121 countries (amounting to 92% of the world’s population) on five key metrics:

• Internet affordability: How long do people have to work to afford a stable internet connection? More affordable internet has a positive effect on digital well-being.
• Internet quality: How fast and stable is internet connectivity? Fast and stable internet helps communication, work-efficiency, and consumption of high-quality content.
• E-infrastructure: How developed and inclusive the existing electronic infrastructure is, allowing internet use for varied activities.
• E-security: Ability to counter cybercrimes and protect online privacy.
• E-government: Digitization of government services, minimizing bureaucracy and corruption, and increasing transparency.

They assign scores on each indicator, which weighted equally, creates one rank for each country. Visit SurfShark’s methodology section for their detailed breakdown of sources, scores, and rankings.

Ranking Countries By Digital Well-Being in 2023

The tagline of the 2023 report is “Europe leads the Digital Quality of Life Index.” This is because the first nine spots of the digital well-being ranks go to European countries.

They’re led by France which ranks first in internet affordability, fifth in quality, and has a top-20 ranking in electronic infrastructure, security, and government.

Here’s the full breakdown of each country’s overall rank, as well as their per metric rank.

Singapore, at 10th, is the highest ranked non-European country on the digital well-being index, followed by Japan at 16th.

Last year’s top-scoring country, Israel drops down to 17th in this edition, and the U.S., and South Korea round out the top 20.

Trends in Digital Quality of Life

Surfshark’s extensive number-crunching allowed them to generate a few deeper insights.

While it is true that wealthier nations generally have better digital well-being—because of the money available to invest in improving key metrics—Surfshark found 22 countries that exceeded expectations in their per-capita GDP bracket. Their higher scores in electronic security, infrastructure, and government improved their overall digital well-being rank.

A majority of these nations are from Asia and Eastern Europe: Philippines, Vietnam, Ukraine, Moldova, Thailand, Serbia, Croatia to name a few.

In fact, SurfShark also found that improving e-government scores particularly had the strongest correlation (0.94) with a better digital quality of life. On the other hand, internet affordability demonstrated the lowest correlation with overall digital well-being, at 0.67.

This underscores the outsized role in providing other services through the internet, as opposed to just improving the internet itself.

This article was published as a part of Visual Capitalist's Creator Program, which features data-driven visuals from some of our favorite Creators around the world.