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.