A Conceptual Model and Methodology for Evaluating E-Infrastructure Deployment and Its Application to OECD and MENA Countries

As information and communication technologies have spread throughout the world, countries have realized the importance of investing more and more in building ICT-relevant infrastructure. However, for fostering further information and communication technology (ICT) development, countries are in need of an analysis tool for measuring their advancement in ICT-relevant infrastructure. Motivated by a variety of attempts to generate measures of ICT development, this study aims to develop an index that quantifies the level of ICT-relevant (e-infrastructure) deployment. In particular, this study introduces two e-infrastructure indices that are composed of six components, namely electricity, telecommunication, Internet, processing power, broadcasting, and human capital. Each component is generated from one or more indicators. This composition provides the possibility of tracking each of them separately and to identify strengths and weaknesses of each country with respect to the ICT-relevant area of the component. It will also help pointing out the source of failure in developing the ICT-related infrastructure and to develop policies for enhancing ICT-related infrastructure accordingly. For the index computation, the study uses a parametric and a non-parametric computation method rather than the traditional approaches which are frequently used in literature. In addition to this, this study also aims at analyzing the indices ranking differences among OECD countries and Middle East & North Africa (MENA) countries, using data for the time period between 2000 and 2007. The ranking of the countries shows that MENA and OECD countries differ significantly in their e-infrastructure development. However, a small group of MENA countries are ranked higher than a few OECD countries. Those countries belong to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).