Roslyn Layton has an article [Measuring the digital economy: Progress across the board] that provides links to important new reports from the ITU and the OECD.
As Roslyn writes:
Too often in the press and policymaking, cherry-picked statistics are used to justify any number of proposals and positions. Single metrics are taken out of context and used to create artificial hierarchies among countries, as if a single data point like broadband speed can convey all you need to know about the health of a country’s networks.
The ITU report, Measuring the Information Society Report 2014 [pdf], is a 270 page report filled with global access, use and skills indicators from 166 countries. Chapter 4 is particularly interesting, examining “ICT prices and the role of competition,” with its concluding section 4.5: “The impact of competition and regulation on telecommunication prices.”
The OECD report, Measuring the Digital Economy: A New Perspective [online], looks at a range of metrics across the 34 OECD member countries. The report is structured with “A Measurement Agenda for the Digital Economy”, a snapshot of the state of “The Digital Economy Today”, and four thematic chapters, covering topics such as infrastructure availability, openness and participation in the Internet economy, security and privacy. The thematic chapters are:
- Investing in smart infrastructure
- Empowering society
- Unleashing creativity and innovation
- Delivering growth and jobs
There are interesting comparisons on productivity in the digital sector contrasted between countries and with the general national economy. Canada’s information industries are found to be operating at 2.5 times the productivity levels of the general economy, well above the OECD average of 60% higher productivity in the information sector.
This chart is expanded upon in section 5.4 of the OECD report.
In another chart [Section 2.9], the OECD found that Canadians had the lowest level of concerns about privacy among all OECD nations when asked main reason for not buying online.
The reports should make for interesting reading over the holidays.