Open data development of countries: Global status and trends

Open data plays a key role for governments strategy to deal with challenges of the future. It has the potential to improve public sector's transparency, engagement of civil society, and economic growth. This paper contributes to answering the questions: Can open data have an impact on innovation? Under which condition is this the case? Which data can be used to assess the progress on a country level? Which countries are successful with open data? How successful are the government actions to support economic development through open data? The exploratory analysis investigates the relationship between open data readiness and measures on impact, and on changes in open data development level and the influence of the country's level of ICT development, transparency and freedom. This paper also takes a specific look at economic impact scores and their correlation with government initiatives for training and innovation on open data. It was found that success on open data at the country level is based on good levels of ICT development, freedom and in the interest of becoming more transparent. There are indications that countries with low ICT development do not profit from open data, but the evidence is limited, due to the small number of countries observed. There is a strong correlation between support for entrepreneurship & business readiness and economic impact. However, the relationship between the development of these indicators during the time of the study and the measured impact is unclear.