Sean Nero

T&T ranks 70th in the lat­est World Eco­nom­ic Fo­rum's (WEF) Glob­al In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy Re­port (GITR). The 14th edi­tion of the re­port, a com­pre­hen­sive as­sess­ment of how pre­pared an econ­o­my is to ap­ply the ben­e­fits of ICTs to pro­mote eco­nom­ic growth and well-be­ing, was re­leased lo­cal­ly this week at the Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness, Mount Hope.

Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Min­is­ter Dr Ru­pert Grif­fith hailed the coun­try's im­proved show­ing in the re­port as ev­i­dence of Gov­ern­ment's com­mit­ment to growth of the ICT sec­tor.

He said it fol­lowed close­ly on an in­de­pen­dent sur­vey con­duct­ed by the In­ter­na­tion­al Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union, which showed that T&T had climbed three points and is now ranked at 67 on the ICT De­vel­op­ment In­dex.

The ITU es­ti­mates that for every ten per cent in­crease in pen­e­tra­tion, a coun­try's GDP is pos­i­tive­ly im­pact­ed by be­tween 0.8 per cent and one per cent.

In the GITR rank­ings, T&T moved up 45 spots to 81st in the world for "In­ter­net and tele­pho­ny com­pe­ti­tion."

"In T&T, mo­bile pen­e­tra­tion in 2014 stood at 149 per cent up from 146 per cent the pre­vi­ous year. This is one of the high­est in the world, and ex­ceeds the de­vel­oped world av­er­age of 128 per cent�and far ex­ceeds that of the de­vel­op­ing world, which av­er­ages 89 per cent," Grif­fith said.

"Do­mes­tic fixed broad­band pen­e­tra­tion rose from 54 per cent to 58 per cent in that same pe­ri­od and we ex­pect cov­er­age of fixed broad­band to reach 98 per cent of T&T.

Rev­enues for the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and broad­cast­ing in­dus­try rose by 12.6 per cent over the pe­ri­od 2011 to 2012 and 4 per cent over the pe­ri­od 2012 to 2013. "This trans­lat­ed in­to $5.3 bil­lion or equal to about 3.3 per cent of GDP for 2012 and $5.5 bil­lion or 3.1 per cent of GDP for 2013."

The min­is­ter point­ed out that this coun­try was not clas­si­fied among na­tions caught in a grow­ing dig­i­tal di­vide where the full eco­nom­ic and so­cial ben­e­fits of the In­ter­net were on­ly avail­able to a mi­nor­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion.

He said the re­port found that many coun­tries were fail­ing to im­ple­ment ba­sic re­forms to in­crease pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, boost eco­nom­ic growth and raise liv­ing stan­dards.

He said while the world's de­vel­op­ing and emerg­ing economies were fail­ing to ex­ploit the po­ten­tial of ICTs to dri­ve so­cial and eco­nom­ic trans­for­ma­tion and catch up with more ad­vanced na­tions, this coun­try was not among them.