Digital Divide: How India and China Stack Up

Abstract

India and China are emerging technological powers and are becoming increasingly important players on the global stage in terms of their gross domestic product (GDP) growth and their share in the world economy. This chapter provides a descriptive empirical analysis for country-level comparison of major economic and information and communication technology (ICT) indicators. The ICT diffusion index (ICTDI) has been constructed to identify within-country inequalities in terms of the digital divide across Indian states and Chinese provinces. The descriptive analysis indicates that India is far behind China on fronts like the maturity of the Internet ecosystem, ICT foundations, ease of Internet entrepreneurship, and ICT health. But Internet growth in India has been around three times more than China between the years 2000 and 2017. The constructed ICTDI indicates that Indian states such as Kerala, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are more digitalised than Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. In China, the East region is dominant as Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Guangdong show higher ICT diffusion.

Appendix

• Definitions (Source: www.itu.int and www.data.worldbank.org).

• Economic growth (GDP) %: The percent change in GDP in a particular quarter from the same quarter in the previous year using constant prices.

• Percentage of world population: The population share of a particular country is measured as its population as a percent of the total world population in a given year. The total population is based on the de facto definition of population, which counts all residents regardless of legal status or citizenship—except for refugees not permanently settled in the country of asylum, who are generally considered part of the population of their country of origin. The values are mid-year estimates.

• Internet users: The internet users are presented as the percent of people who have access to the Internet at home, at work or in public spaces. Definition: Internet users are individuals who have used the Internet (from any location) in the last 3 months. The Internet can be used via a computer, mobile phone, personal digital assistant, games machine, digital TV and so on.

• Fixed broadband Internet subscribers, per 100 people: Fixed broadband subscriptions refer to fixed subscriptions to high-speed access to the public Internet (a TCP/IP connection), at downstream speeds equal to, or greater than, 256 kbit/s. This includes cable modem, DSL, fibre-to-the-home/building, other fixed (wired)-broadband subscriptions, satellite broadband and terrestrial fixed wireless broadband. This total is measured irrespective of the method of payment. It excludes subscriptions that have access to data communications (including the Internet) via mobile-cellular networks. It should include fixed WiMAX and any other fixed wireless technologies. It includes both residential subscriptions and subscriptions for organisations.

• Mobile phone subscribers, per 100 people: Mobile cellular telephone subscriptions are subscriptions to a public mobile telephone service that provide access to the PSTN using cellular technology. The indicator includes (and is split into) the number of post-paid subscriptions and the number of active prepaid accounts (i.e. those that have been used during the last 3 months). The indicator applies to all mobile cellular subscriptions that offer voice communication. It excludes subscriptions via data cards or USB modems, subscriptions to public mobile data services, private trunked mobile radio, telepoint, radio paging and telemetry services.

• International Internet bandwidth: International Internet bandwidth is the sum of the capacity of all Internet exchanges offering international bandwidth measured in bits per second (bits/s).

• Literacy rate: Adult literacy rate is the percentage of people aged 15 years and above who can both read and write with understanding a short simple statement about their everyday life.