Even though India is regarded as the Information Technology hub, Indian has been ranked lowly at 50th place in the recent report – The Global Information Technology Report 2007-2008 – produced by the World Economic Forum in cooperation with INSEAD, the leading international business school.
In this year rankings, Denmark got the coveted position of being the most networked economy in the world, followed by Sweden and Switzerland. Among the top ten, the Republic of Korea (9) and, to a lesser extent, the United States (4) post the most notable improvements.
China fared even worst in the ranking and came in at 57th place, 7 ranks below India. It is quite surprising given the infrastructure development taking place in China in last 2 decades. The comprehensive report ranked total of 127 economies on more than 80 different parameters covering the environment, readiness and usage of Information Technology.
The PDF of full ranking can be found here
Given that India and China are regarded as tomorrow’s super powers, I tried comparing India and China on 20 different important parameters. Here’s how both the economies fared.
The ratings have been rounded off to 7 (7 being the best and 1 being worst)
Graphical representation
Tabular Representation
| Variable | India | China |
| Venture capital availability | 4.12 | 2.98 |
| Total tax rate* | 3.06 | 2.83 |
| Time required to start a business* | 5.66 | 5.58 |
| Freedom of the press | 6.23 | 3.39 |
| Effectiveness of law-making bodies | 4.51 | 4.13 |
| Number of telephone lines* | 1.38 | 3.4 |
| Secure Internet servers* | 1.01 | 1 |
| Electricity production* | 1.11 | 1.33 |
| Quality of the educational system | 4.49 | 3.43 |
| Lowest cost of broadband* | 6.92 | 6.99 |
| Cost of mobile telephone call* | 6.88 | 6.84 |
| Importance of ICT to government vision of the future | 4.8 | 4.63 |
| E-government readiness index* | 3.05 | 3.94 |
| Mobile telephone subscribers* | 1.55 | 2.34 |
| Personal computers* | 1.03 | 1.16 |
| Broadband Internet subscribers* | 1.04 | 1.73 |
| Internet users* | 1.35 | 1.69 |
| Internet bandwidth* | 1.01 | 1.06 |
| Capacity for innovation | 4.01 | 3.83 |
| Availability of new telephone lines | 6.25 | 5.49 |
One of the biggest surprise for me was that India has much more availability to venture capital than China. I had always thought otherwise. If you want to compare any two countries on nearly 80 parameter, you can do it here.
Comments
I cant believe a lot of the above parameters… something is wrong somewhere :S
esp vc, internet bandwidth, users, Time required to start a business lol