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

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