S'pore slips to No 13 in e-readiness
rankings
By Winston Chai - 01 May 2006
The Business Times
AS other countries ramp up efforts to drive Internet and wireless
adoption, mature markets like Singapore have slipped in an annual
ranking of the world's most technology-savvy nations.
Singapore, which took 11th spot last year, dropped two places to No
13 in a study jointly undertaken by IBM and the Economist
Intelligence Unit (EIU).
Published last Thursday, the survey seeks to measure the so-called
e-readiness of a country by assessing how its government,
businesses and consumers use IT to their benefit.
According to the EIU, various factors are taken into account, such
as a nation's connectivity and technology infrastructure, legal and
business environment, as well as the availability of
e-services.
The study revealed that Singapore's dip in placing is synonymous
with the downward spiral witnessed by the Asia-Pacific region as a
whole.
The exceptions are Japan and South Korea, retaining the 21st and
18th spots respectively, and Australia and New Zealand, which moved
up a few notches.
'This (the downward movement) owes less to a lack of digital
progress in Asia than to the comparatively larger growth steps
taken in other regions,' the EIU said in its report.
North America and Western Europe were singled out as the two
regions that have fared well when it comes to translating infocomm
investments into economic returns.
A key factor in Europe's favour this year is that businesses there
are increasingly transacting with their governments over the
Internet, with some countries like Denmark even making the
requirement compulsory.
As a result, European countries took six of the top ten spots in
this year's EIU rankings, with the US hanging on to second
place.
In addition, the survey showed that broadband penetration, which
used to be a key attribute of e-readiness forerunners, is now
becoming less of a differentiating factor.
'North Asian leaders had stolen a jump on other OECD countries with
a rapid acceleration of broadband adoption. Over the past two
years, however, broadband growth rates in the likes of South Korea
and Japan have stabilised, while other e-readiness leaders such as
Norway and Switzerland have made up ground,' the EIU report
said.
'Broadband connectivity is becoming less of a distinction among
e-readiness leaders, and other criteria - such as innovation,
information security and governments' commitment to digital
development - have emerged as more telling differentiators.'
Australia and Hong Kong were the only two countries in Asia to make
the EIU's top 10 list. And while Hong Kong and Singapore were on
par in areas like e-services and technical workforce skills, the
former stood out across several heavily-weighted criteria in the
study, Denis McCauley, the EIU's director of global technology
research, told BizIT.
These include broadband penetration, the traditional legal
framework, as well as laws covering the Internet, he said.
