A study of the effect of population size on global networked readiness

• Main Author: Tugas, Florenz C.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2011
• Subjects: Information technology—Economic aspects; Communication in economic development; Population—Economic aspects; Business; Demography, Population, and Ecology; Technology and Innovation
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/12850
• Institution: De La Salle University

In this era of rapid change, information and communication technology (ICT) is seen as a potent enabler of renewed and sustainable growth. For a particular country, this translates to the propensity, measured by the networked readiness index (NRI), to survive in an environment where competition dictates the pace. The NRI index aims to describe how conducive a national environment is to exploit ICT resources for development and sustainability. This study aims to determine the effect of population size on NRI. Data on these variables were obtained from the 2009-2010 Global Information Technology Report (GITR), a report published by INSEAD and the World Economic Forum (WEF) annually. This report contains comprehensive assessments of ICT readiness covering 133 economies from the developing and developed world. Of these countries, four have incomplete economic profiles. This resulted in having only 129 useful countries-observations for this study. Population size and NRI of these countries were summarized and subjected to ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. As expected, results indicated a negative correlation between population size and NRI. But interestingly, results further showed that population size does not have significant effect on NRI (β = -.007, p>.05). Several implications, conclusions, and recommendations related to the variables being studied were drawn out of these findings.