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The Perplexity of Policy Making

The Studies and Surveys of e-Readiness Evaluation for Countries

There are organizations to evaluate the capability of leveraging information and communication technologies to strength the national competitiveness, they first set up a conceptual framework to classify those indicators to the subindex/subcategories they related, and portion out the weight for calculating the score, then they continue to measure the value for each indicator in every countries. Finally, they analyze and sum up the value of these indicators/variables to rank the countries they survey.

The organizations most well known for publishing the reports in the world are:
1. OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) - The Information Economy Indicators
(1) OECD Information Technology Outlook(1995~)
(2) Defining and Measuring e-Commerce: A Status Report(1999)
(3) STI Scoreboard 2001(2001)
(4) Measuring the Information Economy(2002)
2. WEF (World Economic Forum) - The Networked Readiness Index
(1) Global Information Technology Report(2001~)
3. EIU ( Economist Intelligence Unit) - The e-Readiness Index
(1) The e-Readiness Rankings(2000~)
4. IDC (International Data Corporation) -The Information Society Index
(1) The Information Society Index(1996~)

The organizations which play a functional role to gather and aggregate the data for specific indicator from countries are:
1. ITU (International Telecommunication Union)
(1) World Telecommunication Indicators Database(2004)
(2) Yearbook of Statistics Chronological Time Series 1993-2002(2004)
(3) Asia-Pacific Telecommunication Indicators 2004(2004)
(4) Visions of the Information Society(2003)
(5) ITU Internet Reports(2001~)
(6) The Internet Story: ITU Internet Reports 1997 - 2003(2004)
2. ISOC (Internet Society)
(1) The Internet Connectivity Survey by ISOC Chapters(on the websites of each ISOC Chapters)
3. APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation)
(1) E-Commerce Readiness in East Asian APEC Economies(2002)
(2) Domain Name Registration Survey Report(2000)

The Achievement of Information and Communication Technologies Development in Taiwan-Current Status Report and Issues to Be Addressed

In order to catch on the opportunities of economic growth which is created and accompanied by the coming of the knowledge-based economy, there will be two major key approaches to promote the national economic growth, one is the application and the leveraging of information and communication technologies (ICTs), and the other is the design of the national innovation system. This is the reason why countries and international organizations focus on the study of ICTs development, such as “Competitiveness of ICTs”, “Information Society”, and “e-Readiness”, and have deployed series of researches and investigations to understand the nature of the ICTs and to keep eyes on their development. In this study, we propose that the performance of construction of e-Nation should be evaluated by the efficiency and effectiveness improved by the application of ICTs and divide the country into three key stakeholders: the government, business and resident, to be measured.

As for measuring the competitiveness of a country or the wealth of a nation, GDP is one of the traditional indicators, just as using GDP to measure the economic growth of a nation. Therefore, many countries always use the growth of GDP as the final policy goal of their e-Nation policy. According the experiences in the industrialized countries, for examples American, Finland and Australia, the application of ICTs will contribute the growth of GDP both directly and indirectly. The application of ICTs is indeed the key to bridge the gap from industrialized society to the information society. They are the important tools to leverage the ability and resource accumulated in the country in the past industrial era.

Besides, there are many researches provided by famous international institutions, for examples “measuring the information economy” (Organization for the economic cooperation and development, OECD, 2002), “the Metropolitan new economy index”(Progressive Policy Institute, PPI, 2001), and “Creating a Development Dynamic“(Digital Opportunity Initiative, United Nation, 2001), saying that the more the economics/community prepared for the application of ICTs, through the increase ICTs penetration rate, the design of appropriate national ICTs policy and the construction of the infrastructure etc, the more they gain the growth of GDP and acquire the potential competitiveness.

This study provided here will profile the development of ICTs in Taiwan, analyze the strength and weakness for the ICTs development in Taiwan, and state the problems and obstacles for the further development, based on the secondary data published by the international and domestic organizations and the empirical survey data for this research. The experience of ICTs development in Taiwan will be the important reference case for the newly industrialized countries and the developing counties in the world. Finally we will discuss some important issues for the developing of the information society.

Keywords: Information and Communication Technologies, competitiveness of ICTs, Information Society, knowledge-based economy

View full paper on IRFD(International Research Foundation for Development) website.
Title The Achievement of Information and Communication Technologies Development in Taiwan -Current Status Report and Issues to Be Addressed

The Practices of Management

One of the Macro-views for the Future Development of Taiwan

I had a chat with my friend Tai last week, he works for the Taiwan governemnt for many years, and so he is concerned the future development of Taiwan seriously.

As his statement, there are structual problems happen in Taiwan, First the promotion of the level of eduction to the overall citizens cause the people in Taiwan gradually pay attention to enjoy their personal leisure time, not like their parents, the life of their parents could be simply described by the turns of working and breeding, the parents worked for their childern, not for themselves. They prefer to be DINK (Double Incomes No Kids) than to bring up children. Therefore, the aging of population will cause the minority population to bear the expense of social welfare of the majority population. In other words, the young generation should make more money to afford to the taxation increasement, if we want to keep the same level of social welfare.

Secondly, the people with higher income and erudite won't have any child, but the lower keep on spawning their children, even they can't afford to breed the children up. Not to mention the employment of foreign laborers from Eastern South Asia Countries, e.g. Thailand, Philippine, and the open policy to import brides from Vietnam and China for the disadvantaged minority, they both produced the disastrous consequences at the cultural adaption and the amounts of babies of mixed blood. It's hard to believe that the children will grow up to be the right man to hold the development of Taiwan's future, if the children lack of attention and nurturing.

If we put the education policy, the development of industries, and the aging of population together to think about, there are connections among them. If we want to tranform the industries to play a key role in the value chain of crossnational cooperation networks, such as from assembly line production to the research and design parts/components of product, or establish private brand for international sales, the supply of well-educated people from academies will be the important factor for the transition. If we can't provide the amount of person who are good at the development of product or who are familiar with the international marketing skills, the industries will hardly survive in the gloabl game of cost competition, the migration to the developing counties and the third world will be the only choice to do for the business, the employment of foreign laborers for the manufacturing firms in Taiwan could lower the production cost temporarily, but it cound not solve the cost competition problem permanently.

The aging of population will cause the shortage of labor supply, if the demand of labor remains at th same level as before. It also results in the import of foreign laborers, even the industrial migration. How can we break through the crisis face to us?

Here is my suggestions for the government policy:
1. Encourage the intelligentsia to procreate babies, the intelligentsia will be able to provide a abundant environment to cultivate their children to satisfy the demand of quality for the future development of Taiwan.
2. Improve the design of academic courses to fit the need of industrial development, train for the movement of position in industrial value chain activities.
3. Utilize the knowledges and industrial know-how embeded in the aging people, provide the consulting job to the retired people will creat valuable productivity.

The Changing Role of Human Resource Manager

The Step into the Mgt.

C.T.Chiang