Business Week recently released its annual IT competitiveness report, titled How technology sectors grow: Benchmarking IT industry competitiveness 2008, which ranked 66 countries based on the following criteria:
• Overall business environment: 0.10
• IT infrastructure: 0.20
• Human capital: 0.20
• Legal environment: 0.10
• R&D environment: 0.25
• Support for IT industry development: 0.15
Some findings are not surprising, such as having the US at the top of the heap with 74.6 points, and that the top 20 in the list are composed of developed economies while the bottom 20 are mostly emerging markets. It is interesting to note, however, that the highest-ranked countries or territories are headquarters of popular tech hardware companies. For example, Taiwan (2nd place with 69.2 points), South Korea (8th place with 64.1 points), and Finland (13th place with 61.5 points) are homes to Asus personal computers, Samsung mobile phones, and Nokia, respectively.
