Growing Together: Economic Integration for an Inclusive and - escap

most advanced country for ICT; at the other
extreme, countries such as Papua New Guinea
rank among the lowest. 46 Part of this divide
is attributable to differences in per capita
income. This is illustrated in figure III.7 in
which the size of a country bubble is
proportional to its per capita gross national
income, and its vertical position corresponds
to its value on the ICT develop-ment index
devised by the International Telecommunica-
tion Union. Unsurprisingly, the largest bubbles
cluster towards high ICT development, reflect
ing a strong correlation between ICT development
and per capita incomes (correlation value
of 0.885).
Figure III.7 also shows the importance of ICT
usage prices, indicated here as the percentage
of average income required to pay for a
representative basket of ICT services – ranging
from less than 1 per cent in Singapore, for
example, to over 40 per cent in Cambodia and
Papua New Guinea. As illustrated in figure III.7,
as ICT prices rise, there is a sharp fall in the
ICT development index. Furthermore, at very
low levels of the development index, there
is a group of countries in which the ICT price
basket rises exponentially (inset countries).
These are also the countries with very low
per capita incomes, pointing to the fact that
ICT prices absorb the highest percentages of
average income in those very countries where
people are least able to afford them.
On average, less than 20 per cent of people
in Asia-Pacific have access to the Internet
– far lower than in North America (78%),
Europe (62%) and even Latin America and
the Caribbean (33%). 47 However, of note,
this may underestimate the extent of
disconnectedness in the poorest countries.
In Asia and the Pacific, only 4 per cent of the
population is believed to have access to the
high-speed broadband needed to exchange
content-rich materials through data-intensive
streaming. As a result, it is largely only the
wealthier citizens who can connect and
broadcast ideas, potentially magnifying socioeconomic
disparities and deepening divi-
sions between the connected and the un-
connected.
There are significant differences in the
bandwidth available to different countries. 48
This is derived from wired connections,
primarily terrestrial and submarine fibreoptic
cables, terrestrial wireless transmission,
or satellite-based transmission. Each type
provides services at different quality and
costs.
Similar to the direction of exports, most of
the region’s data transmitting routes link to
markets in Europe and North America. In
fact, around four-fifths of the high-capacity
international routes in Asia are trans-Pacific.
Hong Kong, China; Seoul; Singapore and
Tokyo have emerged as the core global
hubs of Asia where international carriers
have established points of presence. The
rest are mainly through the Indian Ocean/
Mediterranean routes (figure III.8).
Some least developed economies in the Pacific
have made progress in getting connected
with submarine cables to the rest of the world.
Samoa and American Samoa, for example, are
connected through the American Samoa-
Hawaii submarine cable. The Marshall Islands
and the Federated States of Micronesia are
connected via Guam through the HANTRU-1
submarine cable. Other Pacific island
economies are also connected via submarine
cables – such as French Polynesia through
the Honotua cable to Hawaii, New Caledonia
through Australia using the Gondwana-1
cable, and Fiji through the Southern Cross
cable. Thus far, however, these connections
are mostly confined to capitals and densely
populated areas and have yet to be extended
to more remote areas.
Telecommunication costs in the region are
higher than in European and North American
Internet hub cities. For example, while
Hong Kong, China is regarded as the most
competitive Internet transit market in Asia,
prices are still 2.5 to 3.5 times higher than in
London. Costs are even higher in cities far from
major Internet exchanges, such as Bangkok
and Manila due, at least in part, to the cost of
transport back to the primary exchange.
Integrating regional information and
communications technology infrastructure
Internet traffic volumes are expected to
continue to increase exponentially both
82