A new study that examines how countries use technology to improve their social and economic conditions has the United States, Sweden and Japan ranked at the top of the list.
Connectivity Scorecard developed by London Business School professor Leonard Waverman and released today, measured countries on 30 factors, including use of communications technology.
“All the other rankings mainly measure only how much have you invested in ICT (information and communication technologies),” said Ilkka Lakaniemi, the head of global political dialogue at telecommunications network gear maker Nokia Siemens Networks, which commissioned the study.
South Korea’s rank in the middle of the table is an indication that the study took a different angle than other rankings. South Korea is normally in one of the top positions in similar lists, but according to Lakaniemi that is because of public investment and it lags behind in the usage of technology most notably by corporations.
“You have a lot of consumer applications, you have a lot of entertainment applications, a lot of this and that, but they do not really add much to productivity,” Lakaniemi said. The United States benefited the most from ICT, but was rated below 7 out of 10, because of weak usage of large broadband networks, pointing out improvements can be made in all countries.
“These results indicate an opportunity for countries to add hundreds of billions of dollars in economic benefit by rethinking how they measure and enable connectivity,” the study said.
Here are the ratings for “innovation-driven economies” measures in the study on a scale of 1 to 10.
United States 6.97
Sweden 6.83
Japan 6.80
Canada 6.50
Finland 6.10
Britain 6.10
Australia 5.93
Germany 5.52
France 5.07
South Korea 4.78
Hong Kong 4.46
Italy 3.85
Spain 3.56
Hungary 3.18
Czech Republic 3.11
Poland 2.18
Here are indexes for “efficiency-and resource-driven economies” on a scale of 1 to 10 but not comparable with indexes for innovation-driven economies.
Russia 6.11
Malaysia 5.82
Mexico 4.37
Brazil 4.28
South Africa 4.11
China 3.42
Philippines 2.38
India 1.68
Nigeria 1.01
