INSEAD, an international business school, and the World Economic Forum, yesterday released the 12th annual Global Information Technology Report (GITR) with the support of Booz and Company and Cisco.
Three GCC countries rank in top five on government usage of information and communication technologies (ICT) - the UAE (two), Bahrain (four), Qatar (five), with Saudi Arabia following in sixth place.
The new study focuses on 'growth and jobs in a hyper-connected world'.
The report assesses the digital ecosystems of 144 developed and developing countries - accounting for more than 98 per cent of the world's GDP. By ranking each nation using the Networked Readiness Index (NRI), the study examines how these markets leverage advances in ICT to drive economic productivity and social development.
GCC countries also fare well on ICT-driven improvements in well-being covering environment, energy consumption, health progress and more-active civil participation.
Four countries are in the top 20 - the UAE (seven), Qatar (eight), Bahrain (16), Saudi Arabia (18), while Oman and Kuwait fall behind at 34 and 85 respectively.
In the Middle East and North Africa (Mena), ICT investment and use is sharply divided, with several GCC states dramatically increasing ICT investment and performance, while other regional nations have faltered.
The report ranks three GCC countries in the top 30 list globally for the second consecutive year, and another two in the top 40 - Qatar (23), the UAE (25), Bahrain (29), Saudi Arabia (31) and Oman (40), demonstrating that they continue to embrace ICT to boost their country's competitiveness.
"Overall, the Mena region shows stability, both in rankings and scores. Bahrain lost its 2012 leadership position in the Middle East region and dropped two positions in the overall global ranking mostly due to deterioration in affordability and business usage pillars," said GITR co-editor and executive director of INSEAD European Competitiveness Initiative Bruno Lanvin.
Currently, Bahrain ranks third in the Middle East, four positions behind the UAE and six positions below Qatar.
The Business Usage pillar represents Bahrain's most significant weakness with a 56th place ranking, as a result of reduced capacity for innovation. Nevertheless, Bahrain has achieved significant improvement in several key areas such as Internet usage and fixed broadband subscriptions and continues to have competitive standing in overall government usage.
This strong government leadership for the extensive use and development of ICTs in the country (fourth) has allowed a fairly well-developed ICT infrastructure (39th), especially in terms of mobile network coverage (first) and despite a low international Internet bandwidth capacity (73rd).
"Bahrain has been slightly affected by the stagnation in terms of skills development that is crucial to enable the transition of the local economy toward higher-value-added activities," said Abu Dhabi campus director and associate professor of decision sciences Miguel Lobo.
"Although Bahrain counts on a sophisticated business environment (14th), boosting the economic impacts derived from ICTs (52nd) will require continued support to strengthen the innovation system, especially at the business level, which retains a very low capacity (117th)."
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Quelle/Source: Gulf Daily News, 12.04.2013
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