Most of the rankings’ top players have moved upwards in lock step, with little movement in the broader ranks from 2005 to 2006.

Western European countries take six of the top ten spots in this year's rankings, and the Nordics occupy three of them. Denmark (in 1st place), Sweden (4th) and Finland (7th) remain best in class in key areas of connectivity, such as mobile penetration and Internet use. US and Switzerland are in 2nd respective 3rd place.

This year’s results suggest that the goalposts of e-readiness are beginning to move. Broadband connectivity is becoming less of a distinction among e-readiness leaders, and other criteria—such as innovation, information security and governments’ commitment to digital development—have emerged as more telling differentiators.

“Economic progress is increasingly dependent on innovations in the use of technology”, says George Pohle, Global Leader, IBM Institute for Business Value, in a press release. “In economies reaching ubiquitous adoption of the internet and communications technologies, future competitiveness is driven by the creation of new services that exploit the infrastructure”, he continues.

Since 2000, the Economist Intelligence Unit has published an annual e-readiness ranking of the world’s largest economies, using a model developed together with the IBM Institute for Business Value. A country’s “e-readiness” is a measure of its e-business environment, a collection of factors that indicate how amenable a market is to Internet-based opportunities.