Interesting question. My first thought was this:

Examine the correlation of determinants of systemic competitiveness of developed economies with their international technological capacity. As an explanatory variable you can use, for example, the volume of high-tech exports (a variable representing Industry 4.0). As explanatory variables, you can use individual indexes of the Index of Economic Freedom (or additionally other synthetic indexes) and, using econometric modeling, see which explanatory variables have a statistically significant impact on the dependent variable.

This is a quantitative option. PESTEL will be qualitative.