Canada 10th in world in harnessing technology: report

Canada is once again one of the Top 10 countries in the world at harnessing information and communications technology, according to a survey published Thursday.

Canada climbed from 13th to 10th in 2008-09 in the World Economic Forum's annual report on "networked readiness index," returning to the Top 10 after a two-year absence.

Denmark once again topped the annual index, which measures a range of factors that affect a country's ability to harness information technology, including the political and business environment, how many people are using technology and how "ready" individuals and organizations are to adopt new technologies.

The index is based on surveys of executives and raw numbers of measures such as internet users and time required to start a business.

Following Denmark in the Top 10 were Sweden, the United States, Singapore, Switzerland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Netherlands and Canada.

The World Economic Forum, a Geneva-based non-profit foundation, has been conducting these surveys since 2002-03. Canada ranked in the Top 10 in each of the first four years of the survey before dropping from sixth to 11th in 2006-07 and falling again to 13th the following year.

Low 'readiness'

After last year's survey, the forum said Canada's relative poor showing was a result of a low score in "readiness," particularly in how much priority government in Canada gave to information and communication technologies and how ready it was to embrace new technologies.

In the latest ranking, Canada's government readiness climbed from 25th to 20th and its overall readiness climbed from 20th to 14th, allowing Canada to leapfrog over South Korea, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom in the overall rankings.

Canada has the top ranking in the world in the number of procedures required to start a business (one) and the number of households with personal computers (94.58 per 100 households, taken from 2006 data). But Canada was ranked outside the top 50 in categories such as mobile phone subscribers and the survey respondents' assessment of the extent and effect of taxation.

The report covered 134 countries, with Chad, East Timor, Zimbabwe, Burundi and Bangladesh at the bottom.

The WEF report differs in its findings from a report earlier this year by the UN's International Telecommunication Union.

That report ranked Canada 19th out of 154 nations according to how advanced its use of information and communications technology are, and was based solely on hard numbers, such as the amount of bandwidth available per internet user, the proportion of households with computers and internet access, and the literacy and education levels of a country's population.

With files from the Associated Press