Technology upgrade: the problem holding back Brazil’s economy
Published 07 December, 2008, 23:13
Brazil needs to do more if it wants to boost its economy using information and communications technology, research suggests.
In a world where information technology is in almost every nook and cranny of society, countries that don’t know how to use it to boost their economies, are exposing themselves to problems beyond those posed by the current credit crisis.
This is what research made by Professor Leonard Waverman, of London Business School, and his team suggests. They designed a model, the Connectivity Scorecard (CS), a global information and communications technology (ICT) index that measures how communications networks are used by companies, government and consumers to boost economic growth and productivity.
To create the Connectivity Scorecard, the research team brought together data from the countries surveyed related to the level of education, the use of enterprise software in business, access of women to the internet and how much money the government spends in information technology. They did so by analysing economic and country-specific national accounts data.
According to the research, connectivity means not only the infrastructure and the hardware that enable a fast flow of information – internet, fiber optic cables, networked computers, mobile phones – but also how efficiently consumers, government and firms use those infrastructure and hardware to boost economic growth and productivity.
Brazil, the research found, got a 5.28 score in the Connectivity Scorecard test, and was ranked fourth out of the nine “resource and efficiency-driven” economies, namely, Malaysia, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, China, Philippines, India and Nigeria.
Brazil had a good performance when compared to its counterparts seen individually. India, for instance, did very poor: 1.83. When seen in relation to its peers in conjunction, whose overall average score was 4.51, Brazil’s performance was almost average: 5.28 against 4.51.
Delving a bit more deeply in the data, one can see that Brazil performs well in infrastructure: broadband and overall telephone penetration, mobile network coverage, and gender access to the internet.
Brazil’s score in terms of availability of bandwidth per capita is also the highest, signaling that the country has a good infrastructure to support heavy volumes of internet and international voice traffic.
More importantly, Brazil has excellent e-government indicators, but one should not be enthusiastic about that, because the highest weight in the Connectivity Scorecard comes from businesses, not government. It must be so because the use companies make of information technology has the biggest impact on growth, prosperity and well-being of a society, not the government.
Nonetheless, not all news is good news for Brazil. As the results of tests, such as PISA from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, taken by Brazilian students have shown, Brazil faces serious problems in its educational system.
The SC research suggests that poor performance in primary school completion rates by Brazilian pupils is just one of them, lowering thus Brazil’s overall performance in the Scoreboard.
What is reducing Brazil’s general score, the research suggests, has to do with the fact that the country falls short not only in the use of mobile mail, but also in the international telephone traffic per capita, much lower than Malaysia, which is the top scorer among the countries surveyed.
There are several reasons a country does not do well in the Connectivity Scorecard. Ilkka Lakaniemi, Head of Global Political Dialogue of Nokia Siemens Networks, sponsor of the research, gave some suggestions in an interview:
“Government and businesses need to develop joint strategies to successfully increase a country’s individual score. How do you develop the skills levels of the workforce? How do you develop even greater access and gender development in those societies?”
Thus, in spite of seeing these results as unfair, Brazilian companies, government, civil society and policy makers should take them as a wake-up call, and opportunity to leave the comfort-zone. Similarly, they should think ahead and prepare the people of Brazil to exploit the full potential offered by the information technology.
One study by Robert Crandall and Charles L. Jackson, for instance, suggested that increased broadband penetration in the USA could give the nation a long-term benefit of potentially $US 500 BLN.
As the world moves from analog to digital, businesses, policy makers and government in Brazil should look carefully at the Connectivity Scorecard, not only because it has shown where information technology is heading, but also as a means to strategically position the country fast and early, finding new opportunities for its sustained development in the long-term.
For more information, please, visit www.connectivityscorecard.org
Hamilton William dos Santos for RT
São Paulo, Brazil
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