UK flounders near bottom of ebusiness leaders list

So much for Tony Blair's promises of a brave new online world - the UK has been placed seventh in a top ten list of the world's most techie nations.

The UN study lists countries according to levels of technological prowess and achievement. Ahead of the UK are Finland, the US, Sweden, Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands, respectively.

The report will come as a blow to the UK government which has been positioning the country as a leading contender in the ebusiness world for almost two years.

The UN report judges 72 countries across the world on criteria including the percentage of citizens online and the percentage of the workforce with high-level technical skills.

The report did not measure global economic leadership, thereby allowing Finland, with its high-level of web access and excellent infrastructure, to push the US into second place.

However, the UK government can take some solace in that its position at seventh still puts it ahead of Germany, often considered its main competitor in the European IT market.

The report also outlines the leading city and state hubs around which technological innovation develops. London is ranked joint fifth with Helsinki in the world behind Silicon Valley and Boston in the US, Stockholm in Sweden, and Israel.

Cambridge, the Thames Valley and Edinburgh-Glasgow are also all ranked as worldwide hubs for technology innovation.

Barbara Walker of the ebusiness group at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) said the report shows the UK should learn a lesson or two from its Scandinavian counterparts.

She told silicon.com: "We need to do more to quantify why technology is a good thing for business and what the increase in productivity from implementing IT is. Then it will be easier to move up the league tables."

E-envoy Andrew Pinder issued a Cabinet Office statement that claimed it was pleased with the UK's performance, but queried whether the study really measured ebusiness effectiveness.

The statement said: "In order to determine whether the UK is the best place in the world for ecommerce we clearly need to consider broader factors for example, B2B and B2C ecommerce levels per capita and internet uptake in households, schools and businesses."

The findings are part of a much wider UN study, called Human Development Report 2001, which examines how new technologies are impacting on the development of people across the world.

The report is available on the web from http://www.undp.org.