Warsaw ranks 24th on European Digital City Index

Warsaw finds itself  ranked 24th out of 35 in 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 follows: London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Helsinki and Copenhagen. The Maltese capital of Valletta came in last position. 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. Warsaw’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 “the rapid growth of the Polish economy (more than four percent per year, the fastest in Europe, making Poland the sixth-largest economy in the EU)” as a key feature of the Polish capital.