Weighing Up The Impact Of The Internet In Global Economy

Weighing up the impact of the internet in global economy

According to a survey published by the OECD on Thursday 4th of October, the Internet has become an « Unexpendable infrastructure » for global economy. The institution shows, with supporting data, that the Information and Communication Technologies sector (ICT) is a growing engine that you can reckon on.

High tech goes hand in hand with economy. To prove this, 14 million people in the world found a job in this sector in 2011, 6% more compared to the preceding year. Within the countries who are members of the OECD, almost 15 million people were working in the ICT in 2009, which is about 6% of the jobs in the private sector.

If we look at this on a longer period, employment has grown 2% each year between 2000 and 2011 in the ICT sector.

For its survey, The OECD established a list of 250 firms which are the most influential within the ICT.

10 are French, 6 German, 8 British. Not much compared to the 49 Japanese, 18 Taiwanese and 82 American... But «France, Germany, Netherland and the United Kingdom are the European countries who are the most likely to host companies from the top 250 »

If their revenues have decreased more than 3% during the crisis in 2009, almost 4000 billion dollars, their incomes have perked up in 2011, reaching 4,600 billion dollars, a 5% increase compared to 2010. In the field of research and development, companies in the top 250 had an average expenditure of almost 1,2 billion dollars in 2011, a 6% increase compared to the previous year.

At the end of this survey, the OECD concludes that almost every company is now connected to the internet (more than 95% for two thirds of the countries who are members) and half of the employees in Europe have access to the internet at the office. However e-commerce has not yet become common practice.

In France, especially, it represents almost 15% of the entire revenues of the companies who have more than 10 employees. For Taylor Reynolds, this is without any doubt the next step: « We need to make the barriers stopping this evolution give in. The point of view must change in order to discover how to appreciate it fully »

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