Government challenges our lowly e-ranking

By ELLEN READ

The Government is challenging the accuracy of an international survey of e-readiness that ranks New Zealand 20th among the world's 60 largest economies.

The report, from the Economist magazine's Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU), put the United States and Australia in first and second places respectively.

Then came Britain and Canada, followed by Norway, Sweden, Singapore, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands. Pakistan was number 60.

"Our ranking shows how the internet is producing new centres of excellence - look at Australia and Scandinavia.," said EIU editorial director Daniel Franklin.

Information Technology Minister Paul Swain has written to the report's editor seeking clarification of the methodology used and a more detailed explanation of how the rankings were derived.

He said levels of business and general internet usage in New Zealand were similar to Australia, if not slightly higher.

The legal and regulatory environments appeared to be the only significant areas outlined in the report in which Australia and New Zealand differed, he said.

"In a similar report published last year, using slightly different criteria, New Zealand was initially ranked a lowly 35th.

"A review resulting from a question from New Zealand about the criteria used caused New Zealand to be raised to 17th place."

International comparative rankings were not to be taking lightly and the relatively low position of New Zealand was of some concern to the Government, said Mr Swain.

But the EIU's findings that New Zealand is a mid-grade achiever appear to be backed in a report issued this month by the Waikato Management School on the adoption and implementation of e-business in New Zealand.

Although the levels of computer use were very high for activities such as e-mail and information exchanges, there was considerable scope for further development of electronic business activities, the report said.

Although approximately half of the companies had websites that performed a range of communication and transaction functions, only one in five websites was capable of secure transactions and one in seven of receiving payments online.

"At the big picture level it shows that we're like Australia and Canada and many of these other economies where we're doing a lot of the fairly simple activities, such as we've got a high penetration of computers and we're all doing e-mails all the time," said Associate Professor Delwyn Clark of the Waikato Management School.

"But we have not got the sort of depth of penetration in terms of the web-enabled business processes."