The paper analyzes the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), which characterizes the development of digital economy. Based on the data of 28 European countries for 2013–2018, using the panel regression, we studied the influence of the consumption index growth by the purchasing power parity and unemployment among the active population on the structural units of DESI. It is shown that a 1% increase in the consumption index results in about 0.2 increase in the DESI, and an increase in unemployment by 1% leads to about 0.2 DESI decline. It is also shown that the 98% value of DESI is actually determined by its previous trends, and therefore it is impossible to increase this index rapidly. Some reflections and conclusions are made on the perspective of the developing states, i.e., Ukraine, that is not yet assessed in DESI ranking.

The term “energy security” is used almost everywhere in economic and political discussions related to energy supply. However, different authors use different meanings to express the concept of energy security. Quite often, this term is used to give more importance or relevance to issues that are often not inherently related to energy security. Attempts to define the essence of the concept of “energy security” have hitherto not been systematic and are characterized by a variety of approaches, and some insufficient justification especially in the aspect of state national security is notable. Our contribution to the discourse development is the consideration of energy security as part of internationally recognized indices that are developed to assess the temperature of world security. A regression modeling approach to test the crucial factors of social-economic development that impact the energy security indicators is presented. The literature analysis and review of the world’s existing national security indices show that the link between energy security and national security is in fact hardly considered. Mostly, energy security is considered in the dichotomy concerning economic security at the international, as well as national levels. The calculative regression modeling revealed that the significant correlation of economic and energy security is just for the U.S.A., the rest of the analyzed countires display the weak or non-significant correlations of the indices of economic/energy/security threats. That pushes the discussion on whether energy security is indeed so impactful a factor for geo-policy and geo-economy, or whether it is mostly the well-rolled media-supported megatrend. However, the present study notes a great shortage of long-term cross-state indices to reflect energy, economic, and national security to allow for valuable modeling.

The green energy transition is associated with the use of a wide range of metals and minerals that are exhaustible. Most of these minerals are limited in access due to small resource fields, their concentration in several locations and a broader scale of industry usage which is not limited exclusively to energy and environmental sectors. This article classifies 17 minerals that are critical in the green energy transition concerning the 10 main technologies. The following classification signs of metal resources were used: (1) the absolute amount of metals used in the current period for energy; (2) projected annual demand in 2050 from energy technologies as a percentage of the current rate; (3) the number of technologies where there is a need for an individual metal; (4) cumulative emissions of CO₂, which are associated with metal production; (5) period of reserves availability; (6) the number of countries that produced more than 1% of global production; (7) countries with the maximum annual metal productivity. The ranking of metals according to these characteristics was carried out using two scenarios, and the index of the availability of each mineral was determined. The lowest availability index values (up to 0.15) were calculated for cobalt, graphite and lithium, which are key battery minerals for energy storage. Low indices (up to 0.20) were also obtained for iron, nickel and chromium. The calculation of the availability index for each mineral was enhanced with linear trend modelling and the fuzzy logic technique. There are two scenarios of demand–supply commodity systems with a pre-developed forecast up to 2050: basic independent parameter probability and balanced fuzzy sum. Both scenarios showed comparable results, but the second one highlighted supply chain importance. Generally, the lowest availability index values (up to 0.15) were calculated for cobalt, graphite and lithium, which are key battery minerals for energy storage. Low indices (up to 0.20) were also obtained for iron, nickel and chromium. The fuzzy logic model helped to reveal two scenarios up to 2050. The two scenarios presented in the current research expose a high level of uncertainty of the projected 2050 forecast.