StartUpArabia

The newly released global e-readiness rankings published by the Economist Intelligence Unit, UAE leads the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in e-readiness this year, even though it dropped a couple of spaces from the year before.

The UAE came in at rank 35 in a list of 70 countries compared to 33 last year, the UAE scores 6.09 out of a possible 10, compared to a score of 6.22 in 2007. This puts it ahead of countries such as Turkey (rank 43), Saudi Arabia (46), Jordan (53), Egypt (57), Algeria (67) and Iran (70).
The United States has toppled Denmark to be at the top of the 2008 rankings.

E-readiness is a measure of the quality of a country’s information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and the ability of its consumers, businesses and governments to use ICT to their benefit.

“When a country uses ICT to conduct more of its activities, its economy can become even more transparent and efficient. The e-readiness rankings also allow governments to gauge the success of their ICT strategies against those of other countries, and provide companies wishing to invest overseas with an overview of the world’s most promising investment locations from the perspective of e-readiness,” the EIU said in a briefing paper released recently.

# Source: Zawya