Networked World and National ICT Development Strategies for Selected East Asian Countries

Master's Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Business economics - Economic Policy, grade: 1.3, University of Wuppertal, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this paper is three-fold:

- To identify the characteristics and political options of a country, that would affect the success of its ICT adoption.

- To identify clusters of nations upon the international ICT indices and GNI per capita

- To provide an overall guideline that incorporates these nations toward developing higher ICT indices.

[...] This paper shows income level and social background can play very important roles in

country¿s ICT development. Within Asian region, South Korea represents the developed

group, China and Vietnam characterize the developing group. China and Vietnam have

similar political structure but the first is much bigger than the latter. Therefore, ICT

implementation is different between these 2 countries. This paper is organized as follow, first,

short overviews of ICT development as well as the advantages of ICT. Second, 3 countries

(South Korea, China and Vietnam) are described in details in both national characteristics and

ICT performance. In this section, the ICT industry and development of each country are

analyzed in terms of what they have done to adopt ICT as well as how much progress has

been made. In section 4, the information about popular ICT ranking indices are given. The

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three chosen indices are Networked Readiness Index, Digital Economy Ranking and ICT

Development Index. The empirical research of cluster building for 12 selected countries is

presented in Section 5. In the final section, the guidelines for better ICT adoption are

presented. In particularly, Vietnam and China are discussed in more details and their political

recommendation is drawn.

The data used in this paper are mostly from World Bank, Information Technology Union. The

indicators and indexes provided are for 2010 or 2011. Because the crisis from 2007-2009

could affect negatively in the world economy and ICT particularly, GNI per capita and GDP

growth rate of 2010 present relatively better research result.