Catch up and overtake Indonesia

The competitiveness of the economy is determined by the level of IT development

The Russian League of Independent Experts in the Field of IT (LINEX) published the results of an interesting statistical study carried out on the example of 37 countries, including Russia. It turned out that the competitiveness of national economies depends on the level of maturity of IT services markets.

As initial data, experts used the Growth Competitiveness Index (GCI), published in September 2005 in the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report 2005-2006, as well as the maturity index of national IT markets - services (IT-Services Country Maturity Index, ITS-CMI), published by LINEX in November 2005 in the information and analytical materials of the Datamonitor agency. The Vremya Novostey newspaper wrote about the results published by Datamonitor, according to which Russia ranks last 37th in IT market maturity.

The World Economic Forum report analyzed the economies of 117 countries, the basis for comparison of which was the statistics of the activities of 11 thousand leading companies in these countries. The resulting GCI index is used to assess the ability of the national economy to achieve sustainable growth in the medium and long term.

The CGI evaluates three groups of factors: the quality of the macroeconomic environment, the effectiveness of public institutions and the level of technological development. The IT services market maturity index (ITS-CMI), in turn, takes into account three basic indicators: the technological level of the country in terms of the economic demand for IT, the level of market consumer maturity of IT, the variety and complexity of IT services provided in the country.

Russia took 75th place in the GCI ranking this year and is located after Indonesia - exactly the same as in the ITS-CMI ranking (where Indonesia ranks 36th after India and China, and Russia 37th ).

WEF experts recognize that one of the most important tasks facing the Russian government is to return the country to the path of outstanding scientific and technological achievements, so that Russia can stand on par with the most competitive countries in the world. Russia's current lag in the field of information technology, as is clear from the LINEX study, turns out to be critically important from the point of view of its competitiveness.

The reason Russia lags behind in the development of the IT services market is the insusceptibility of companies to technologies that increase the efficiency of their work. According to LINEX member and author of the ITS-CMI index Sergei Karelov, this is in good agreement with the general conclusions of the analytical company Gartner, published in the summer of 2002. If companies are not interested in transparency in order to operate successfully, if the state is present in the most important markets not as a regulator, but as a participant, if connections in government agencies as a competitive advantage are more important than cost reduction, the conditions for the country’s IT development are unfavorable.

Anna MAYOROVA