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India, China and Russia
Another striking disparity in our Connectivity Scorecard is in the resource and efficiencydriven
economies. The key difference is between China and India. India scores just 1.83
on our modified Scorecard for resource and efficiency-driven economies, compared to
4.45 for China. Both countries, of course, have a significantly long way to go before they
can claim that they are meaningfully connected societies, but the Indian performance is
especially poor. Much has been made of late of the burgeoning competition between the
two superpower economies of the future, but it is clear from this research that both India
and China still lag a considerable way behind the innovation-driven economies and
indeed behind many Efficiency driven economies.
India scores lower than China on virtually every major dimension of connectivity—
consumer infrastructure and usage, business infrastructure and usage, and government
infrastructure and usage. Literacy in India is substantially lower, and there is a glaring
gender disparity in Internet access (only 23% of Internet users are female in India). For
India, the immediate connectivity priority would appear to be better infrastructure
provision, followed by better provision of complementary capital (e.g., better overall
education).
It may surprise some that Russia performs well in our Scorecard. However, when
benchmarked against China, India and Latin American economies, it is not surprising
that Russia does well. Russia scores well in literacy, gender equality in Internet access,
and in usage of technologies such as mobile by business users. The Scorecard
captures the fact that Russia has a relatively strong human capital endowment that may
serve it well in making the transition to being an innovation-driven economy.
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Table 4 below provides some comparisons between India, China and Russia, the three
“giants” among emerging markets (these are giants in terms of their population size and
endowment of military and natural resources).
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