A Critical Assessment of the Capabilities of Five Measures for Ict Development

A variety of single-item composite indices for measurement of information and communication technologies (ICTs) at the country level are currently used to gauge the extent of technological development in developing countries. However, the values that are obtained from these measures typically are not comparable for the purpose of development and growth policy analysis. To remedy this, in 2003 the United Nations World Summit on Information Society called for the creation of an ICT Development (Digital Opportunity) Index. In this article, we survey and critique existing approaches for measurement of ICTs at the country level and identify five streams of measures that inform our efforts to identify the appropriate bases for the design of more effective metrics. They include: discrete non-economic measures, economic measures, technology adoption and diffusion measures, single-item index measures and digital divide measures. We suggest that the overall impact of ICTs can be accounted for in terms of four distinct dimensions: economy-related, society-related, knowledge-related and the temporal dimension. Based on the state of diffusion of ICTs, we categorize single-item index measures in terms of those that measure ICT-readiness, those that assess ICT intensity, and those that gauge the impacts of ICTs. We identify a number of issues and concerns that need to be addressed relative to the single-item index measures. Our evaluation concludes that there is no single-item index that will be able to measure the overall impact of ICTs. As a result, we recommend that the object of an ICT Development Index should be measurement of the impacts of ICTs.