Armenia has moved seven positions up in the Network Readiness Index (NRI) to take the 58th place among 143 countries, Yerevan-based economy and values think tank said today.
NRI, produced by the World Economic Forum in cooperation with INSEAD and Cornel University annually, measures the preparedness of an economy to use ICT to boost competitiveness and well-being and tracks the development of ICTs around the world.
The report assesses the digital ecosystems of 143 developed and developing countries — accounting for more than 98 per cent of the world’s GDP.
The Networked Readiness Index is made up of four main categories (sub-indexes), 10 subcategories (pillars), and 53 individual indicators distributed across different pillars: Environment sub-index (Political and regulatory environment and Business and innovation environment), Readiness sub-index (Infrastructure, Affordability and skills), Usage sub-index (Individual usage, Business usage, Government usage) and Impact sub-index (Economic impacts and social impacts).
Armenia has improved its positions in NRI by 36 positions in 2012-2015, the best performance indicator. It has progressed in all four categories when compared to 2014, showing a significant improvement of 13 points in impact sub-index.
Of former Soviet republics only Azerbaijan (down 8 points) and Kazakhstan (down 2 points) did not have positive growth, while Georgia’s position did not change.
The report singles out telephone and Internet connection as Armenia’s most interesting advantages (Armenia is the leader in this category) and also creation of new companies, prices for broadband Internet, e-government services and the rate of e-participation.
The most significant deficiencies are the number of procedures required for the application of contracts, government procurement of advanced technologies, the level of staff training, school management quality, introduction of technologies by companies and independent judiciary.
"In general, among the countries with lower-middle income, Armenia's position is quite high. Armenia has improved position in relation to application of technology by the government, in particular, e-participation, which was reckoned as a serious shortcoming in previous reports,' said the report.
Europe is home to some of the best connected and most innovation-driven economies in the world, the report said. Seven of the top ten countries this year are Europeans. Nordic countries continue their impressive performance in leveraging ICTs, including Finland (2nd), Sweden (3rd), Norway (5th), Denmark (15th) and Iceland (19th). These five countries have featured in the top 20 of every edition since 2012.
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Quelle/Source: Arka News Agency, 16.04.2015
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