How the most advanced nations can remain competitive in the Information Age: Leveraging information and communications technologies for national economic development

Globally, the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) continues to rise sharply. The overview of this series, "How nations thrive in the Information Age", describes research findings where the world's nations occupy one of three tiers: the most advanced "Established Leaders", the heterogeneous middle tier of "Rapid Adopters" and the "Late Entrants". In this paper, we highlight the challenges and opportunities for Established Leader nations. To stay on top, countries must not only update existing ICT infrastructures and find new ways of using ICT – they also have to meet their aging populations' needs.

All nations in developing and advanced economies have become such extensive users of information and communications technologies (ICT) that their economic success now depends on their continued wise promotion and deployment of these by their governments at a national level. Governments in the most economically advanced countries in the world are committed to using these technologies to continue enhancing their nations' competitiveness and to improve the internal operations of public agencies.

However, just as ICT can offer nations potential opportunities to improve the economic and social quality of citizen's lives, challenges to national success also exist. Thoughtful policies and effective implementation of national economic development policies that integrate economic, social and technological strategies are essential to compete effectively in the globalized economy of the twenty-first century. This fact has not been lost on up-and-coming nations who either aspire to challenge the predominance of today's leading nations or need to function as peers, as is the case for recent entrants into the European Union.¹

Thus, there is growing urgency for policy makers to incorporate ICT into economic policies because of expanding international competition for such resources as skilled labor, investment funds and trade. ICT has clearly become an important part of national strategy, largely due to remarkable improvements in various technologies over the past two decades. Also, just in the past few years, there has been a significant up-tick in the adoption of such tools as the Internet, wireless communications, as well as "computing" that is embedded in all manner of goods and services.

To read the full study, download the PDF file at the top of this page.

References:
¹ Cortada, James W. Ashish M. Gupta, and Marc Le Noir. "How rapidly advancing nations thrive in the Information Age: Leveraging ICT for national economic development." IBM Institute for Business Value. January 2007.