Evaluation of information and communication technology development in G7 countries: an integrated MCDM approach

Information and communication technology (ICT) contributes highly to various sectors of modern societies. Due to rapid growth of ICT and its spread into different sectors, ICT now has noticeable impacts on economic and social growth. Considering both positive and negative impacts, governments are continuously working on proposing better policies and recommendations to improve their ICT infrastructures. However, proposing better policies is highly depended on understanding past and current policies to have a complete overview of the situation. In this regard, evaluation of countries’ performance in terms of ICT development is of great significance. This paper attempts to evaluate the ICT development based on social and economic indicators using an integrated MCDM approach. To provide a real-life benchmark, G7 countries as major developed countries are investigated using real data from OECD datasets. For this purpose, six major indicators as ICT employment, ICT goods exports, ICT investment, ICT value-added, and internet access are considered to comparatively evaluate performance of G7 countries. Results indicate that United States of America along with Japan as top countries based on their ICT development while countries such as Italy and Canada are found to have the weakest performance which should upgrade their ICT policies to maximize their performance