Abstract
The eminent presence of globalization coupled with the advancement of information technology continues to penetrate and integrate societies and nations in a manner previously unknown. To stay competitive, most countries advocate and implement policies and amenities to encourage technological acceptance and adaptability. In this study, we investigate into the factors explaining the diffusion of ICT and its impact on economic activities. To gauge such, we examine the influence of ICT diffusion on a country’s economic orientation. Our rationale is that greater the extent of ICT adoption in societies, the greater the economic and social development. For the purpose of this study, a set of Latin American countries is studied to capture the relative effect of various social, economical, and infrastructural variables into the overall ICT level, where ICT level is proxied by the Network Readiness Index adopted from World Economic Forum. The result indicates that a country’s IT expenditure, age dependency ratio, literacy rate, and urbanization draw significant attention in explaining ICT diffusion in this region. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4038/icter.v3i2.2846 The International Journal on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions 2010 03 (02) : 25 -33
Highlights
A consensus among scholars and policy makers is that to understand the impact of globalization on world economies, as well as to gain an advantage in the opening of the competitive world that lowering of barriers would create, economies should not ignore the infusion effect of information technology and its diffusion within the immediate surroundings
This paper examines the threads of association between the levels of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in countries with analytical insights into the economic, social and demographic frameworks
Researchers and Scholars have concluded that ICT level is a function of economic development and infrastructure of a country, as well as a driver for competitiveness
Summary
A consensus among scholars and policy makers is that to understand the impact of globalization on world economies, as well as to gain an advantage in the opening of the competitive world that lowering of barriers would create, economies should not ignore the infusion effect of information technology and its diffusion within the immediate surroundings While this phenomenon has increased trade, countries at present are relying on other strategies to attract more business and growth within their economies. We differentiate our result by focusing on a particular region; all countries selected for this paper are developing or emerging countries to assert that possibly the degree to which these indicators play in these countries maybe different from previous findings, as argued by Bagchi and Edo [4] The effects of these factors could be similar or different on developed and developing nations depending on the specific factor considered
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