Canada has climbed to sixth in The World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2002-2003, following last year’s ranking of 12th. The report, which examines the use of information technology infrastructure, is an index of 82 world economies.
Finland was ranked number one, followed by the United States, Singapore, Sweden and Iceland. The United Kingdom, Denmark, Taiwan and Germany rounded out this year’s overall top ten.
The report was broken down into three sections: the environment component, readiness component and the usage component index. It examined a wide variety of topics such as venture capital availability, the brain drain and firm level innovation.
Of all the categories, Canada received top honours in only one: the waiting time for a telephone mainline. Canada ranked second in the availability of broadband access, fourth in the number of secure Internet servers and eighth in both overall infrastructure quality and in the quality of local IT training programs.
But the news wasn’t all positive. For example, Canada ranked a disappointing 48th for businesses using e-commerce, 44th in the cost of business
telephone subscriptions, and 32nd in the number of mobile phones for every
1, 000 people.
The World Economic Forum is an independent organization, concerned with world affairs. Its report is online at www.weforum.org.
