Malaysia – strong all-round performance helps it retain top spot

Malaysia continues its reign on the Connectivity Scorecard 2010, topping the group of resource and efficiency-driven economies for the third consecutive year with a consistently outstanding performance across the board.

Malaysia achieves the top score in consumer usage and skills, with literacy rates of over 90% as well as the highest number of internet users in its peer group. It also reports high levels of mobile telephony and broadband penetration. Malaysia is the top scorer in business usage and skills, where it boasts the highest level of international voice traffic, good business spending on IT and telecom services and respectable secondary school enrolment levels. It also fares well in terms of estimated government spending levels on software and hardware.

Malaysia’s performance has its share of weaknesses, including low penetration of secure internet servers and inadequate internet bandwidth per capita. In addition, its good performance on government-related metrics is marred by the below-par utilization of e-government services.

With its consistently good performance, Malaysia holds out the promise of transcending into the innovation-driven economies. For this, the country needs to weed out its weaknesses and further build on its strengths.

Malaysia Connectivity Performance by Scorecard Component