National digital economy programs of the middle east countries

Introduction. Developing national digital economy strategies is becoming increasingly popular worldwide; in many cases the strategies appear to be the key documents of national strategic planning. At the same time the available documents demonstrate a wide range of approaches to structuring the agenda, formulating the project roadmaps and even using the descriptive language. Aims. The comparative analysis of various national digital strategies can, on the one hand, help to work out the effective approaches to constructing future documents of the kind, and, on the other hand, contribute to the study of overall process of national economic strategizing in the countries with market and partly market economies. Methods. The paper compares national digital strategies of the Middle East countries. The region, while sharing a lot of common historic and cultural past, is currently extremely diverse in terms of economic, social and political models, this factor directly affecting the formulation of national digital strategies. The analysis is based on the theoretical foundation of the typology of relation between state and society suggested by Thomas Murtha and co-authors in the context of innovation strategies of Western economies. Results. Three hypotheses are formulated in regard to the peculiarities of national digital strategizing in the countries with different economy structure and different political models; they are verified through content analysis. Conclusion. The content analysis of strategic documents does not confirm the initial hypotheses, thus urging to review the Murtha’s model, in particular, in relation to the role of national economic strategizing in the context of autocratic governments as compared to the governments formed on the basis of open political competition. It is stated that the digital strategy agenda has yet been very poorly internalized by those responsible for national economic strategies in the Middle East region. The larger part of documentation presents common place statements derived from business literature on the subject. The proposed sets of actions are standard and lack serious argumentation for their relevance in a concrete social and economic situation in a concrete country. Many of the strategies state the necessity to develop a national IT sector but give no grounds for this in the context of global digital economy. This may well be viewed as the inevitable drawback stemming from the initial stage of comprehending the possibilities of using digital technologies for the benefit of national economies development.