TUNESS Chart of the Week (TCW), March 11, 2013
The philosopher Antonio Negri characterizes “information society“ as one in which people do immaterial labor. In fact, “ information society”, a concept that emerged starting from the seventies, was introduced by theorists to capture the transformations the modern societies have been witnessing due to technological advancements, in particular, the fluency and ease with which information is being created , distributed, used, integrated and manipulated. The question that this note is trying to address is “to what extent could Tunisia be considered an information society? “.
This question is going to be tackled through an analytical approach based on metrics and indices that have been designed to measure information societies. Indeed, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has developed the ICT Development Index (IDI) where ICT stands for information and communication technologies. The IDI index is meant to quantify and measure the information society. The IDI comes as a global score and also as three sub-indices: IDI access, IDI use, and IDI skills.
As shown in the table above, the IDI index ranks Tunisia 85 among 154 countries in 2011. While Tunisia’s rank stayed almost the same between 2007 and 2011, it jumped by 10 places from 2002 to 2007. It is worth noting also that Tunisia has better ranking in IDI use during 2010 and 2011 than IDI access and skills. Something that may explain the key role ICT has played during the Tunisian revolution.
Among 16 Arab countries, Tunisia was ranked 8th with global IDI score of 3.43 in 2010, the year during which the revolution was triggered.
Since we do not intend to reconstruct the IDI index or analyze its underlying factors, in the remainder of this note, we will shed the light on its correlation with the ICT imports and exports of goods and services in the Tunisian case.
In particular, we examine the ICT goods imports (% total goods import), ICT goods exports (% total goods exports) (), and ICT services exports (% total services exports) , and their predictability of the IDI index.
Only five IDI scores could be gathered from the IUT publicly available reports, corresponding to the years 2002, 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2011. Based on the ICT indicators (see chart above) , we examine the possibility filling the gaps in the IDI score time series, and predicting the score of 2012. This task could have been performed based on the indicators used by the IUT to compute the IDI. However, we are not interested in duplicating the IDI approach, but rather interested in looking into the correlation and the predictability between the import/export of ICT goods and services.
The indicators ICT goods imports/exports (% total goods imports/exports) span over the time frame 2000 to 2010. We fit ARIMA models to both time series to predict the indicators values for 2011 and 2012. The same procedure is performed for the ICT service exports (% total service exports) to predict its 2012 values. The three ICT indicators are then used as predictors to fit a linear model that predicts the IDI global index. The data points used correspond to the years 2002, 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2011. The linear model constructed based on the available data points is:
IDI = 3.5769 - 0.6410x X + 0.6724x Y - 0.0842x Z (1)
It is clear from (1) that the IDI has positive correlation with ICT goods exports, and negative correlation with the ICT goods imports and ICT services exports. Except for the ICT services exports, the correlations uncovered by the model in (1) do make sense and meet the intuition. The negative correlation between IDI and ICT services exports might be explained by the fact that the way the IDI has been built doesn’t take into consideration the country’s contribution in terms of ICT and the presence of its production in the world market. It could also be due to a statistical fluke.
Using the linear model in (1) to compute the missing IDI values between 2000 and 2011. This same model is also used to predict the IDI for 2012 which leads to a score of 3.7001. An ARIMA model fitted to the IDI time series between 2000 and 2011 predicts an IDI score of 3.37 in 2012. Obviously, a decay in the IDI is being predicted, and this could be explained by the post-revolution economic hardship Tunisia is going through.
Chart prepared by Oualid Missaoui PhD., TUNESS Research Team
Data source: World Bank, International Telecommunication Unit