Fili’s world
A different look at Asia, China and Taiwan
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The Networked Readiness Index of 2007-8 has been published this week.
The Report uses the Networked Readiness Index (NRI), covering a total of 127 economies in 2007-2008, to measure the degree of preparation of a nation or community to participate in and benefit from ICT developments.
The NRI is composed of three component indexes which assess:
- the environment for ICT offered by a given country or community
- the readiness of the community’s key stakeholders - individuals, business and governments
- and the usage of ICT among these stakeholders
I’ve been highly involved with IT for many years now and I do see IT infrastructure as a projection of a country’s potential in almost every possible economy related aspect. I believe “IT readiness”, as they call it, it key for a country’s success in the global competition.
So, out of 127 countries, I find the top 20 extremely interesting :
- Denmark 5.78
- Sweden 5.72
- Switzerland 5.53
- United States 5.49
- Singapore 5.49
- Finland 5.47
- Netherlands 5.44
- Iceland 5.44
- Korea, Rep. 5.43
- Norway 5.38
- Hong Kong SAR 5.31
- United Kingdom 5.30
- Canada 5.30
- Australia 5.28
- Austria 5.22
- Germany 5.19
- Taiwan, China 5.18
- Israel 5.18
- Japan 5.14
- Estonia 5.12
There are a number of reasons why I find this list interesting :
- All of East Asian tigers as well as Japan are in the top 20, making their way up the rankings each year.
- Israel and Taiwan show, once again, remarkable similarities in many fields, especially when it comes to economy and IT.
- Both Israel and Taiwan are quite high up, considering their somewhat sensitive world political status. It never ceases to amaze me how those two small countries succeed regardless of extreme difficulties (and I swear to God, the next person who says that these two countries owe their recent IT and economy-related success to the states will suffer the fury of my rage). Surprisingly enough, Israel and Taiwan are more “IT ready” than Japan (!?).
That’s it. Interesting, I say.
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John
| April 18th, 2008 at 5:26 pm #
Let’s hear it for Estonia! Hip hip… Hooray!
Helen
| April 18th, 2008 at 6:10 pm #
Estonia has been in top 20 before
Helen
| April 18th, 2008 at 6:25 pm #
Fili, did you have time to look more into how the NRI’s were given. I had some time last week to look into it. The makeup of the final grade, so to say, is very different for the top 20 countries - I mean what each of the 20 is strong at. E.g. what gets Taiwan into the 20 is high-tech exports,utility patents and state of cluster development. But in many other important areas they are not doing so good, e.g. #125 in e-participation (well, i know it is hard to be good at everything). I wish I had more time to look into the criterias in detail ( I just looked Denmark, Estonia and Taiwan more closely).
I think the so called winners will be the countries who can continue to stick into this top and can be more stable in the different criterias (e.g. if you look at Japan, their ranking in the different criterias are in a smaller range, with few exceptions (cost of cell phone calls and total tax rate).
But this is not my deep analysis, as I haven’t had time to compare the details too much. It was definitely an interesting study.
The more detailed information by countries can be searched here: http://www.insead.edu/v1/gitr/wef/main/analysis/showcountrydetails.cfm
fiLi
| April 21st, 2008 at 8:53 pm #
Helen - yeah, I saw that briefly. It is a very interesting study, and there are slight differences in the IT structure. Thanks for commenting on that and providing the link.