Poland ranks 24th on European Digital City Index

Poland finds itself on 24th rank out of 35 on the European Digital City Index  2015 (EDCi), right behind Germany’s Cologne. The EDCi measures how various European cities facilitate startups, scale-ups and other digital companies. The top 5 spots are as following: London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Helsinki and Copenhagen. The Maltese capital of Valletta took the last spot. Despite Poland being known as a new hub for the video game industry, Warsaw still lags behind compared to its western counterparts, according to the study. Poland’s relatively low ranking is due to the ‘brain drain’ that Poland has suffered since joining the EU in 2004. Since then, 2 million Poles “mostly the young and the entrepreneurial,” have left to western Europe for higher wages. The index also takes into consideration the lack of  “access to finance” that startups and scale-ups suffer from in Warsaw. The index lists “rapid growth of the Polish economy (more than four percent per year, the fastest in Europe, making Poland now the sixth-largest economy in the EU)” as a key feature of the Polish capital.