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Pakistan among the beginners in Global Connectivity Index

Business Recorder (BR) Research

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, recently launched its 2015 Global Connectivity Index (GCI) for countries showing which countries are poised for development, growth, and planning in the ICT sector by benchmarking fifty economies in terms of connectivity, ICT usage, and digital transformation. Drawing from the rise of the digital economy, the recent edition of the index is a more comprehensive as far as connectivity is concerned, which not only includes the computing and networking but also focuses on other elements of the digital economy like e-commerce and demand.

Key insights from the Global Connectivity Index show that it has a strong correlation with GDP. Therefore higher the per capita GDP, higher would be the GCI scores. It states that a 20 percent increase in ICT investment will grow GDP of a country by one percent.

While the leading and mature economies lead in GCI scores, Pakistan is classified among the beginners. The countries are classified as Leaders, Followers, and Beginners where Leaders are mainly mature economies, Followers are mainly developing economies, and Beginners are developing economies that are far from other countries. Beginners constitute 20 percent of the 50 countries. The key distinction between the Leaders and the Followers or Beginners is the investment in demand and improved usage in experience; the Followers and Beginners are focusing on developing supply at this stage.

Though Pakistan lies at the end of the GCI ranking, the Follower cluster is closer to the Beginners than the Leaders. The report highlights that the Beginners need to invest more in a data center and related ICT and telecom areas as well as their cloud capabilities. Followers and Beginners are also advised to move beyond just focusing on pushing out the network and ramp up their investment to build an adequate supply of core systems and transformation enablers.

As far as the distinction between the Followers and the Beginners is concerned, the former has higher fixed broadband penetration rate, higher mobile devices adoption, and moderately higher use of data for analytics and application downloads.

This article originally appeared on May 18, 2015 in Business Recorder (BR) research.

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