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United Kingdom UK is second to US in e-business, report says |
In 1998 British Prime Minister Tony Blair had a vision: Make the United Kingdom the best place on the planet for conducting business on the Internet by 2002. A November report by the management consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton says it just missed the target.
The United Kingdom has the second-best environment for e-- commerce development, behind the United States and narrowly ahead of Canada, according to the Booz Allen report, called "The World's Most Effective Policies for the e-Economy."
The report, commissioned by the British government, |
compared and ranked the United Kingdom against eight other leading countries-Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States-across 112 different indicators of success in building wired economies.
Criteria examined included Internet access, usage and purchasing rates for consumers, percentage of businesses hosting Web sites and making purchases online, government services offered and used online, availability and pricing of broadband access, strength and size of technology and venture capital sectors, availability of digital television services and the legal and regulatory environment for e-commerce development.
The United Kingdom's ranking was boosted by its e-commerce-friendly regulatory environment, advanced venture capital market (second only to the United States) and its leadership in digital television access and business Web sites. Areas where the United Kingdom still lags behind other leading countries include PC ownership rates, Internet and broadband access rates, the percentage of businesses buying and selling over the Web and citizen usage of government services. Only 16% of the United Kingdom's Internet population has used government services online.
The published version of the Booz Allen report, prepared in conjunction with the Francebased business school Insead, leaves blank the names of countries in the overall ranking as well as some individual categories so as not to embarrass laggards.
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