ICTlogy

The Economist Intelligence Unit — in co–operation with the IBM Institute for Business Value — has published the The 2007 e-readiness rankings.

One of the caveats the EUI launches is that the ranking methodology has been modified, hence changes in rankings methodology raise the bar of e-readiness leadership, giving more weight to leadership and, thus, strong government role in promotion and adoption of ICT propel Asian countries upward. It is my opinion that stressing leadership role — and, indirectly, the role of the political and legal framework — is a good thing to do, as it is far demonstrated that is one of the most important barriers or catalysts — depending on the sign — when fostering the Information Society.

Another comment on this change in the ranking methodology is that, by doing it, the EUI e-Readiness Raking comes closer to the World Economic Forum Networked Readiness Index. In other words: they seem to be explaining more and more the same thing. Strange as this statement might sound, the following graphic can shed some light on it:

R2 value of NRI vs. EUI regression

The figure shows the R² value to the regression NRI = C₀ + C₁*EUI + ?. We can read the R² value for 2006 — even if the report is issued in 2007, the ranking values are 2006’s — as EUI e-Readiness Ranking explains the 90.7% of the NRI Networked Readiness Index. This is far more than 2004’s value of 0.8235 (say, 82.3%). For those concerned in ICT and e-readiness measuring and indices, this is good news, as approaches seem to be getting closer. As can be seen in the next graphic , the value of the independent variable coefficient (X, in the graphic) seems to be (slowly) approaching the value of 1 while the constant is almost unchanged.

Constant and X-coefficient values of NRI vs. EUI regression

So far, the good news and/or comments. But the EUI also highlights the following findings:

• E-readiness goalposts for countries are shifting.
• The digital divide continues to narrow, even with the model changes.
• Broadband is increasingly affordable, and almost everywhere.

I mostly agree with giving more importance to online content and services. Actually, I fully agree: infrastructure makes poor sense if, because of i.e. low digital literacy levels, this infrastructure is underused and no content or no services are provided online. But, again, I cannot agree that the digital divide is narrowing. On one hand, this is something that The Millennium Development Goals Report 2006 and UNCTAD’s Information Economy Report 2006 already put under quarantine. On the other hand, the EUI just ranks 69 economies, which are, of course, the most developed ones. So, even if it is true that the distance between the highest and lowest scoring countries dropped from 6.08 points to 5.80 points this year it is not fair to generalize this statement for the whole world, leaving out of the analysis more than 120 countries, two thirds of the total. And same for broadband.

Summing up: a good tool that comes to its 8th edition, providing good information along years, and that seems to be showing good results. But an information that should be consumed with caution.

More info

• The 2007 e-readiness rankings page
• The 2007 e-readiness rankings report (1.44 Mb)
• A compilation of e-Readiness bibliography
• A compilation bibliography by the Economist Intelligence Unit
• A compilation bibliography by the World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum has released the Global Information Technology Report 2006-2007.

First conclusions at first glance:

• Scandinavian countries, Singapore, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK and the US and again on top 10
• India and China losing some positions in the overall ranking, but still and important ICT power in Asia
• Many Latin America and Caribbean countries scaling up, with important improvements in some cases (the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Guyana, Ecuador)
• Africa getting (even) worse

The International Telecommunication Union has issued their report on world telecommunications: Measuring the Information Society 2007: ICT Opportunity Index and World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators.

The most relevant news is the publication of a new ICT index called the ICT Opportunity Index, which is the result of the merger of the ITU’s Digital Access Index (DAI) and Orbicom’s Monitoring the Digital Divide/Infostate conceptual framework.

It is important to note that this new index is the one that UNCTAD used in their Information Economy Report 2006, and it is not the same one as the Digital Opportunity Index. While this last one, the DOI (published in the World Information Society Report), is the result of agreeing some basic common indicators to measure the Information Society, the so called ICT core indicators, the first one, the ICT-OI goes far beyond the focus on infrastructures of the DOI and includes categories such as skills, uptake and use intensity.

UNCTAD has released their Information Economy Report for year 2006

The Information Economy Report 2006: The Development Perspective provides unique data on the adoption of ICT by enterprises in developing countries. It also explores ICT policy options in a developing-country context and proposes a framework for national ICT policy reviews and for the design and assessment of pro-poor e-strategies.

As it is stated in this introduction, it is true that the whole report has a focus on development: chapter 1 talks about e-readiness and the digital divide trends; chapter 2 reviews the successful factors to foster the Information Economy (Information Society); and chapter 3 is dedicated to ICT4D and ICT4P (yet another acronym: ICT for Poverty Reduction). Next chapters enter specific sectors such as oil, employment and e-commerce, but always with this development bias.

I’d like to quote something we’ve already stressed here before:

With regard to the type (or mode) of Internet access, there are large differeces between developed countries, where broadband is growing rapidly, and developing countries, where dial-up is still prevalent. This changing nature of Internet modes of access is a new dimension of the international digital divide.

(Page xxi. Emphasis is mine)

It is interesting to note that UNCTAD uses Orbicom’s methodology to analyze the digital divide, instead of, for instance, ITU’s indices such as DAI or DOI, or UNCTAD’s own index of ICT Diffusion, which, I agree, are most incomplete when considering the whole economy and not only infrastructures.

More info

• Information Economy Report 2006 (website)
• Information Economy Report 2006 (Full report)(12.2 Mb)
• UNCTAD Publications selected collection
• Sciadas, G. (Ed.) (2003). Monitoring the Digital Divide… and Beyond. Montreal: Orbicom.
• Sciadas, G. (Ed.) (2005). From the Digital Divide to Digital Opportunities. Montreal: Orbicom.

This Benchmarking system is jointly developed by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development. Technical development is carried out by the Institute of Software Technology & Interactive Systems of Vienna University of Technology. We gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support from the Government of Austria.

The Benchmarking Tool is an interactive web-based system consisting of two modules: MDG Benchmarking and ICT Benchmarking.

The ICT Benchmarking lets you compare country data (provided by ITU: Total Tel. Subscribers, Mobile Subscribers, Main Tel. Lines, Internet Hosts, Internet Users, PCs) with your own quality of access (measured by your own Upload Speed, Download Speed, Google Search, Yahoo Search, MSN Search, access to Government’s Site) or with dataset spreviously saved by other users. Curious.

• United Nation’s Benchmarking Tool
• ICT indicators collection
• Development indicators collection

As an output of the XIII Cumbre Judicial Iberoamericana [XIII Latin American Summit on Justice], some researchers produced a report on the state of e-Justice in the 22 countries members of the summit.

After a first draft, now the report has officially been released. The researchers taking part in the report team are Pere Fabra (who coordinated), Albert Batlle, Agustí Cerrillo, Antoni Galiano, Ismael Peña-López (myself ;) and Clèlia Colombo.

If you can read Spanish (you should ;) I strongly recommend its reading, not because I’m one of the authors but because it goes deep into what I think is still an unexplored issue of both the Information Society and the area of Justice administration, the e-Justice index on of its most interesting contributions.

• Report (4.69 Mb)
• Executive Summary (399 Kb)
• Bibliographic Citation
• More bibliography on e-Justice