Rights Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License Barriers to Global Electronic Commerce: A Cross-Country Study of

So far electronic commerce has primarily been limited to electronic business-to-busi-ness transactions and small, but quickly growing, consumer-oriented activities on the Internet, such as electronic advertisements mated with the traditional mail-order oper-ations. What lies ahead in the future is a concept of true global electronic commerce (GEC), in which firms will exploit a virtual value chain to migrate much of their value-adding activities from the physical marketplace to the virtual marketplace. The capability for business concerns to be able to reach out to a global business community at a relatively small cost is very attractive and promises to transform international busi-ness. Despite this realization, it has become increasingly evident that the proliferation of GEC is dependent on resolution of a myriad of technical, organizational, economic, cultural, political, and legal issues. In this study, field studies of 10 companies in Hong Kong and Finland were con-ducted with an eye toward identifying the major barriers that have hindered or slowed down the wide acceptance of electronic commerce across borders. In addition to sev-eral country-specific barriers to GEC, resistance to change, lack of education about th