A comparative study to classify ICT developments by economies

Information and communication technology (ICT) attracts more and more attention as the diffusion of Internet grows rapidly. This study intends to classify ICT developments by using a different approach: a clustering technique to classify the economies with only two essential variables, namely the number of Internet subscribers and gross domestic product. This study performs a comparative analysis for 121 economies covering the period from 1999 to 2007. Then, this study validates classification results against the research results in previous studies and finds the proposed approach more effective. The classification results help to explain the global ICT developments. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.