A cross-country comparative study on technological & infrastructure factors as the critical growth factors of e-commerce

This paper aims to identify the critical growth factors (hereafter called CGFs) that are essential to the development and growth of e-commerce in a country. The paper starts with reviewing and reclassifying factors explicitly examined by prior studies that have never been unified. The technological & infrastructure factors consist of sub factors that are (a) security, (b) the capacity of Internet connection, (c) IT infrastructure, and (d) telecommunication infrastructure. To identify the sub factors related to the growth of EC, we examine pooled data of 21 industrial and 21 developing countries over period from 2000 to 2003. For data analysis, several indicators are examined in terms of both absolute and incremental value in order to investigate the states of the growth of EC at a particular time and across time. The findings show that the technological & infrastructure factors are critical to the emergence of EC at a particular time. When a country is ready for EC at a particular time, the development of and the increase in the technological & infrastructure factors do not promote the growth of EC. This supports the argument that beyond the readiness of country for utilizing e-commerce there are still some non-technological CGFs remain to be investigated in further studies.