Estonia ascended two notches to place 22 in the World Economic Forum's (WEF's) Global Information Technology Report 2013, which also highlighted shortcomings in Estonia's ICT innovation system.
Estonia climbs to place 22 in global IT report of WEF
17th April 2013, 15:36
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Estonia placed 31st by political and business environment, 24th by infrastructure and 25th by usage of IT. In terms of economic and social impacts from IT Estonia ranked 15th.
Once again, Estonia ranks as the highest Central and Eastern European country, in 22nd place, the reports says. The strong vision of its government, by which it placed 23rd, and its success in developing ICTs as one of the critical industries for the local economy continues to yield good impacts, both in economic and social terms, where the country depicts one of the strongest performances across the globe.
Following the example of the Nordic countries, Estonia has managed to develop a strong ICT infrastructure and encourage a strong uptake by citizens, by businesses in their transactions with other businesses and government, and by the government, which continues to expand its offerings of online services.
Going forward, the country could benefit even further by strengthening its innovation system, which still suffers from some weaknesses and limits the private sector's capacity to innovate and thus benefit from the full potential that ICTs can offer, the report says.
The table of rankings for 2013 was topped by Finland, followed by Singapore, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, the UK, Denmark, the United States, and Taiwan. Estonia was preceded by Japan in place 21 and followed by Qatar in 23.
Lithuania ranked 32nd and Latvia 41st. Russia was ranked 54th and Romania as the worst scoring EU member state in 75th.
At the bottom of the table, places 142 to 144 went to Chad, Sierra Leone and Burundi.
The Global Information Technology Report (GITR) series has been published by the World Economic Forum in partnership with INSEAD, one of the world's leading and largest graduate business schools, since 2002.