U.S. Leads World in Productive Use of Telecommunications Technology

Connectivity Scorecard, a system that ranks countries on around 30 indicators that measure how will a country boosts its social and economic prosperity through telecommunications technologies, puts the United States at the head of the list. The system was created by London Business School professor Leonard Waverman to examine how well countries utilize networks, cell phones and computers.

The study was paid for by Nokia Siemens Networks. Professor Ilkka Lakaniemi said this new approach to studying telecommunications puts a country like South Korea in the middle of the list because it isn’t simply based on investment in telecommunications but on usage.

“All the other rankings mainly measure only how much have you invested in ICT (information and communication technologies),” said Professor Ilkka Lakaniemi.

“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, which has benefited the most from ICT, was rated below 7 out of 10. This is mostly due to a weak usage of broadband networks. All countries surveyed have much room for improvement.

“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.

The following are the rankings of innovation driven economies that are rated by the study on a scale of 1-10:

United States 6.97; Sweden 6.83; Japan 6.80; 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.

The following are indexes for efficiency and resource drive economies, scale 1-10, but not comparable with indexes for innovative-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.