Ionuț Dragoș Lupșoiu

This research evaluates Romania’s alignment with Sustainable Development Goal 9 by examining the relationship between digitalization, innovation capacity, sustainable infrastructure, and industrial environmental performance within the European Union. Using Eurostat data for 2015 and 2023, the research applies hierarchical cluster analysis with Ward’s method and squared Euclidean distance to classify EU Member States according to seven indicators: gross domestic expenditure on R&D, R&D personnel, patent applications to the European Patent Office, sustainable passenger transport, sustainable freight transport, air emission intensity from industry—PM10, and high-speed internet coverage. The analysis identifies five clusters for 2015 and three broader clusters for 2023. The two cross-sectional classifications reveal different patterns of similarity among EU Member States, while substantial structural heterogeneity remains. Leading countries combine strong R&D intensity, high patenting activity, advanced digital infrastructure, and low industrial emission intensity. Romania remains in the structurally constrained cluster in 2023, despite strong high-speed internet coverage and favourable freight-transport performance. The findings show that digital infrastructure alone is insufficient to ensure sustainable industrial growth without stronger innovation capacity, technological output, and cleaner industrial transformation.

The persistent shortage of ICT specialists across the European Union has intensified the strategic relevance of digital human capital as a determinant of labour market resilience and structural competitiveness. This study provides a systematic assessment of how ICT human capital—proxied by ICT tertiary enrolments, graduate output, and specialist employment—shapes the employment prospects of recent tertiary graduates in the EU-27 between 2013 and 2023. Drawing on harmonised Eurostat panel data and fixed-effects estimations with robust corrections for cross-sectional dependence, the analysis disentangles both direct effects and context-specific moderations associated with economic development, urbanisation patterns, and renewable energy penetration. Results demonstrate that ICT enrolments exert a consistently positive influence on graduate employability, whereas the labour market impact of ICT graduates and specialists is heterogeneous, reflecting differentiated absorptive capacities and sectoral saturation dynamics across Member States. Interaction effects further reveal that the urban concentration attenuates marginal returns to ICT education, while the integration of digital and green transitions remains institutionally underdeveloped. Collectively, the findings position digital tertiary education as a core pillar of sustainable employment formation yet highlight the necessity of coordinated policy architectures that align higher education pathways with regional labour market structures and the evolving green-digital policy agenda in Europe.