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29 September 2005
Global praise for Australian innovation
Australia is among the top 10 most economically competitive nations in the world, according to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2005 Global Competitiveness Report, released in Geneva yesterday.
Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Coonan, welcomed the reports finding that Australia had improved across all components of the WEF competitive index including technological readiness and innovation.
“The Government’s policies supporting information and communications technology and Australian companies’ readiness to be innovative and harness new technologies has contributed to this significant result,” Senator Coonan said.
“ Australia ’s capacity to absorb new technologies is reflected in our strong productivity growth in recent decades .”
Chief Economist and Director of the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Programme, Augusto Lopez-Carlos said: “ Australia’s performance deserves generous praise. Australia gets top scores in those indicators which assess the country’s ability to absorb new technologies and use them to leverage the development process.”
“The Australian Government has been working to stimulate Australia’s capacity to generate and share knowledge within ICT,” Senator Coonan said. “We are also seeing Australia moving up the global rankings for broadband take-up.”
According to the reputable Nielsen//NetRatings survey, Australia has overtaken Sweden and now has the sixth highest take-up of the countries they survey. According to Nielsen//NetRatings as at August this year, 59 per cent of Australian home Internet users were using broadband.
This trend is consistent with a number of recent surveys including the latest data from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which showed total broadband subscribers had increased by 108 per cent to 2,183,300 in the year to June 2005.
“ The Government's vision for broadband in Australia is strategically aligned to achieving economic benefits,” Senator Coonan said. “The National Broadband Strategy gives primacy to effective competition, and is complemented by targeted funding initiatives and other measures.”
The WEF rankings are drawn from a combination of hard data, publicly available for each of the economies studied, and the results of the Executive Opinion Survey, a comprehensive evaluation conducted by the WEF in the countries covered by the Report. This year nearly 11,000 business leaders were polled in 117 economies.
The Global Competitiveness Report 2005–2006 is available at www.weforum.org/gcr