Methods

 < Day Day Up > 



To review the current e-commerce efforts of Least Developed Countries, I conducted a detailed analysis of nine countries. The countries are Nicaragua, Pakistan, Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal, Tanzania, Sudan, and Mozambique. These countries were selected because they were the nine countries identified as "marginal"—the lowest of four levels of technological sophistication — by the United Nations Development Programme in 2001. They would seem to have the least capacity to participate in e-commerce.

My research focused on three questions.

  1. What technical resources are available in these countries to support e-commerce?

  2. What business model are companies following?

  3. For those companies attempting to sell goods over the Internet, what kind of goods are they selling?

I used three primary data sources:

  1. Published statistics from the United Nations Development Programme.

  2. An inspection of all the e-commerce web sites in all nine countries. Business web sites in these countries were identified by using search engines and business directories. Each site was checked to ensure that the business being presented on the web had a significant export-orientation. Businesses that were mainly local (e.g., restaurants, health services, banks, automotive) were excluded. Given the shortcomings of search engines, and given the costs of business directory listings, clearly many more export-oriented business web sites exist than were found in this study. But the sites located do represent a substantial portion of the web sites extant in each country in 2002 and correspond roughly to the Internet Software Consortium Internet host count for July 2002.

  3. A short email survey sent to many of the businesses identified in three countries—Nepal, Nicaragua, and Tanzania. These countries were selected because of their geographical balance (one country per continent). More than 200 companies were contacted by email — 116 companies in Nepal, 44 in Nicaragua, and 57 in Tanzania. Since Nepal and Tanzania have a huge number of hotel/resorts on line, it was not felt necessary to query more than a reasonable sample of these businesses. Returned emails indicated that several businesses were no longer using their web sites for business, or had ceased functioning entirely (five in Nepal, one in Nicaragua, and two in Tanzania). That left a total of 209 businesses in the three countries which received the email survey (see Appendix A for the survey questions).



 < Day Day Up > 



Advanced Topics in Global Information Management (Vol. 3)
Trust in Knowledge Management and Systems in Organizations
ISBN: 1591402204
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 207

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net