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.
