DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONS AS A DRIVER OF CHANGES IN SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: CONTRADICTORY AND ASYMMETRIC CHARACTER OF DIGITAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE DIGITAL RECONFIGURATION OF ECONOMIC SECURITY

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to substantiate the theoretical interpretation of digital transformations as a contradictory and asymmetric driver of socio-economic development that penetrates all traditional dimensions of economic security and converts digital security and cybersecurity into its constitutive mechanisms, and to demonstrate that the balance between strengthening and undermining economic security is determined not by technologies as such but by the configuration of regulatory and institutional frameworks of digital security, cybersecurity, and antimonopoly policy. The article proposes a conceptual framework that interprets digital transformation not as a linear modernization process but as a permanent multi-vector restructuring that penetrates the food, energy, and financial dimensions of economic security from within, transforming them through digital tools and platforms, with the consequence that traditional dimensions of economic security cannot be analytically separated from the digital contour without losing the substance of the analysis. The thesis of the contradictory and asymmetric character of digital development is substantiated, according to which the same technological foundation simultaneously expands the space of market opportunities and produces new forms of concentration of economic power, with benefits concentrated in a narrow circle of actors and risks dispersed across a broad base of participants, which transforms the question of the overall impact of digitalization on socio-economic development into a question of differentiated analysis of distributional outcomes for various groups of actors. Digital competition is analysed as a meta-mechanism of redistribution of economic power through such forms as platform competition, coopetition, escalation model, and algorithmic collusion, which together form a new matrix of threats to economic security and require a fundamental rethinking of antimonopoly policy. Digital stratification is examined as an endogenous factor that undermines economic security from within the national economic space through the erosion of the tax base, labour market, consumer demand, and fiscal capacity of the national state, while digital agents and artificial intelligence are interpreted as a new frontier of systemic risks of economic security that require the formation of international mechanisms of risk management going beyond the traditional regulatory toolkit.