Abstract
In recent years, the expression “Digital Economy" has strongly emerged. In its simplest form, digital economy can be defined by doing economic activities using information and communication technologies.
What contributed in the widespread use of digital economy is the birth of the internet in general and one of its greatest services which is the service of “World Wide Web" or as they call the “WWW". The strongest side of the Internet is its ability to changes the world converting it from a vast space to a small domain where the barriers of place and time have vanished. The importance of digital economy stems from being an important matter to both individuals and governments.
For many years, people considered the GDP the indicator for people happiness and countries welfare, this has proven wrong. That is because GDP was built on only measurable financial transactions, any other activity that cannot be represented in a recorded transaction, the GDP neglect it.
Due to this problem, important issues such as family spending, education, mental health and environmental activities cannot be represented, and economy in general and the GDP in particular lost its power as an indicator for happiness and countries welfare. Accordingly, in the year (6006) an organization called (New Economics Foundation “NEF") introduced to the world a new indicator of happiness and called (Happy Planet Index “HPI") a British company that gave priority to people rather than to economy. That index took into account several factors other than economic ones, those factors were such as: mental health, environment, family spending and several others.
The United Nations has followed suit, urged the world to look after their people welfare and introduced to the world another index in 6022 and called also the (Happy Planet Index “HPI"). In the year 6025 the UN published its first happy planet report and generated two other reports in 6022 and in 6022.
All indicators discarded economy and economic indicators as they considered those indicators misleading as they discard important factors that are not represented by financial transactions, and depended on surveys asking people directly about their feeling of being happy according to (Cantril ladder).
The main objective of this paper is to shed the light on the importance of digital economy to the measure the world happiness. The power of digital economy is its ability to measure every human activity including petty cash spending that represent regular family spending. It also has the ability to record and trace financial transactions pertinent to environmental activities.
The importance of this paper is due to reintroducing economy, one more time, through digital economy as a driving force in measuring happiness.
The research found that United Arab Emirates was on the top of the ladder of both digital economy and country happiness in the Middle East, but it was not included in details in this research due to insufficient data.
Canada was selected due to several reasons, those reasons are: Canada is one of the big seven (G2); It is one of the leading countries in digital economy in the world; Canada is ranked as number seven in the united nations happiness report in both 6022 report and 6022 report; and finally, the most important criteria “data is available".
Data analysis of Canadian economy shows that Canada is moving rapidly in the path of digital economy specially in the years 6022 and 6022 where Canada was ranked number seven in the world HPI.