Measuring the Information Society: The ICT Development Index

International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has released its ICT Development Index (IDI), which compares developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) in 159 countries over a five-year period from 2002 to 2008. The Index combines 11 indicators into a single measure that can be used as a benchmarking tool globally, regionally, and at the country level. These are related to ICT access, use, and skills, such as households with a computer, the number of internet users, and literacy levels. The Index also measures the global digital divide and examines how it has developed in recent years. The report features the latest ICT Price Basket, which combines 2009 fixed telephone, mobile cellular, and fixed broadband tariffs for 161 economies into one measure and compares these across countries, and over time. The analytical report is complemented by a series of statistical tables providing country-level data for all indicators included in the Index.

Trends include the following: "....Promising developments are currently taking place in the mobile broadband sector. The introduction of high-speed mobile Internet access in an increasing number of countries will further boost the number of Internet users, particularly in the developing world. Indeed, the number of mobile broadband subscriptions has grown steadily and in 2008 surpassed those for fixed broadband. At the end of 2009, there were an estimated 640 million mobile and 490 million fixed broadband subscriptions.

....Overall, countries that rank towards the top of the IDI are from the developed world, whereas most of those towards the bottom of the IDI are low-income countries from the group of Least Developed Countries (LDCs). Nevertheless, several countries - including some developing countries - have shown strong improvements in their IDI score and ranking between 2007 and 2008. Notable examples include Bahrain, Cape Verde, Greece, Macedonia, Nigeria, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Viet Nam. While some of these countries still rank low on the IDI (e.g., Nigeria or Viet Nam), their improvements illustrate the progress these countries are making in information society developments.

....Countries that have made outstanding progress in the area of ICT access (reflecting a substantial increase in fixed or mobile telephony, international Internet bandwidth or household access to the Internet and computers) include Armenia, Croatia, Estonia, Macedonia, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Viet Nam. The countries that made the largest improvements in the use sub-index include Bahrain, Georgia, Greece, Kazakhstan, Lao P.D.R., Luxembourg, Macao (China), Nigeria, Sweden, Singapore and UAE (reflecting a substantial increase in Internet usage, and fi xed or mobile broadband uptake).

....Indeed, in 2008, mobile cellular penetration and fixed broadband penetration in developing countries had reached the level that Sweden (ranking first in the IDI) had almost a decade earlier, and the number of Internet users per 100 inhabitants was the same as Sweden’s just over 11 years earlier. In contrast, life expectancy in developing countries is lagging Sweden by 66 years, and the infant mortality in developing countries in 2007 was at the same level where Sweden stood 72 years earlier.

....The ICT Price Basket allows policy makers to compare the cost of ICT services across countries, and provides a starting point for looking into ways of lowering prices - for example, by introducing or strengthening competition, by reviewing specific tariff policies and by evaluating operators’ revenues and efficiency. Between 2008 and 2009, the cost of ICT services has dropped in almost all of the 161 countries included in the ICT Price Basket, with an average drop of 15 per cent (Table 2). Fixed broadband services showed the largest price fall (42 per cent), compared to 25 and 20 per cent in mobile cellular and fixed telephone services, respectively.

...The ten countries with the greatest decrease in the fixed telephone sub-basket are all low-income African countries that have relatively high fixed telephone tariffs....Countries where mobile cellular tariffs dropped dramatically between 2008 and 2009 include Azerbaijan (81 per cent), Sri Lanka (67 per cent), Nepal (64 per cent), Ukraine (58 per cent) and Mexico (52 per cent)....At 122 per cent of monthly gross national income (GNI) per capita, the fixed broadband sub-basket remains by far the most expensive component of the ICT Price Basket....On average, a high-speed Internet connection represents 500 per cent of average monthly GNI per capita in Africa, making fixed broadband effectively inaccessible for most people in the region. In the Arab States and Asia and the Pacific regions, the fixed broadband sub-basket represents 71 and 46 per cent of income, respectively, compared to around ten per cent in both the Americas and CIS [and] less than two per cent of average monthly income... in Europe."