OREANDA-NEWS. Huawei released its 2015 Global Connectivity Index (GCI) for countries, benchmarking 50 economies in terms of connectivity, ICT usage, and digital transformation, providing an indicator of which countries are best poised for development and growth, and an ICT planning reference for policymakers looking to embrace the digital economy.

The 2015 edition of the GCI sees a more comprehensive and advanced framework and methodology. With double the number of ICT variables and countries analyzed last year, this year’s GCI enables the drawing of correlations needed to establish investment targets for governments and other stakeholders. What distinguishes the GCI from similar indices is a broader definition of connectivity that encompasses networks, computing, and storage, while also emphasizing the non-infrastructure elements of a functional digital economy, such as service demand, and e-commerce activity, etc.

The United States ranks the highest among surveyed countries, on the strength of robust supply and demand of ICT services, and an advanced state of adoption, with other mature economies such as Sweden, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom rounding out the top five.

Chile, China, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) lead the developing markets, with all three ranking in the high teens to low twenties overall. Developing market leaders are characterized by strong mobile adoption and overall access that is often comparable to developed markets, while typically lagging behind in terms of data center investment and other core elements of ICT infrastructure. Datacenter investment by developed countries is three times that of developing countries, which is the major catalyst of cloud proliferation as “the edge does not exist without the core.”

Overall, the 2015 GCI shows that 20% growth in ICT investment will increase a country’s GDP by 1%. It also identifies five enablers of digital transformation – data centers, cloud services, Big Data, broadband, and the Internet of Things. These technologies represent the targets that stakeholders should focus their investments on in order to most efficiently transform their economies for the digital age.

All economies are digitizing, and the GCI provides a guide of who’s ahead, who’s behind, why, and who is poised to move up or back. Mr. Kevin Zhang, President of Huawei Corporate Marketing, said, “The Global Connectivity Index is not merely a ranking of countries. We see it as a platform to partner with policymakers and enterprise leaders to identify, harness, and create new digital economy opportunities with the aim of building a Better Connected World.”