Since 2015, the GCI has tracked the progress of 79 economies in deploying digital infrastructure and capabilities.
This year’s index benchmarks 79 countries according to their performance in 40 indicators that track the impact of ICT on a nation’s economy, digital competitiveness, and future growth. Combined, these countries account for 95 percent of global GDP.
Starters are proactively catching up with the other clusters. The average scores of all three clusters have improved since 2015, with Starters showing the highest compound annual growth rate (CAGR) with 4.95 percent, followed by Adopters (4.58 percent) and Frontrunners (3.38 percent).
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Starters improved in broadband performance faster than the other clusters, said the report. Over the last five years, they have increased mobile broadband adoption by over 2.5 times, with several countries achieving close to 100 percent coverage.
Their 4G subscriptions rose from an average of 1 percent in 2015 to an average of 19 percent in 2019. In some countries, 30 percent of the population has high-speed 4G mobile broadband coverage.
Mobile broadband affordability, as measured by the cost of mobile broadband divided by GNI per capita, has improved by 25 percent.
Increased Internet access has opened up new economic opportunities, causing annual spending on e-commerce to almost double since 2014 to more than 2,000 USD per person in 2019.
Some Starters were moving up the GCI cluster, increased their GCI scores by up to 17 percent, and managed to raise GDP to a level that was 22 percent higher than some peers.
Vietnam is one of the countries becoming adopter economies last year.
Economies with higher ICT maturity could drive digital transformation to respond quicker to the COVID-19 pandemic, mitigating the negative impact on GDP per capita by 50 percent, says the report.
Organisations in economies with higher GCI scores are able to react faster to the COVID-19 pandemic and use digital tools and services to mitigate the impact of lockdowns and social distancing. Due to the availability of high-speed broadband, cloud services, AI, and IoT solutions, they could quickly implement distributed workforce models, migrate to e-commerce platforms, and digitally transform their operations to maintain business continuity, it says.
The forecast decline in their GDP per capita is about 50 percent lower than for emerging GCI economies, it says.
