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NEW Zealand is a world leader in its adoption of electronic commerce, says a new report. But it needs to develop people alongside its technological infrastructure.
The State of E-New Zealand, by researchers from Victoria University's Institute for the Study of Competition and Regulation (www.iscr.org.nz), said earlier studies which said New Zealand was lagging behind Australia and close trading partners were flawed.
"New Zealand is not only much more e-ready than past studies have portrayed, but indeed already much more active in uptake of new infrastructures and technologies than past international comparisons have led us to believe," said authors David Voles de Boer, Lew Evans and Bronwyn Howell.
The study compared infrastructure investment and use in a number of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.
It measured factors such as the number of secure servers - needed to conduct e-commerce - the number of Internet domains registered and hosted, the telecommunications environment and the highly competitive Internet service provider industry.
And it concluded that far from being a tardy participant, "New Zealand is among the world leaders in electronic commerce and potentially offers a conducive environment for the development of new ways of trading electronically".
Keeping this advantage in the face of continually changing technologies relied on retaining and improving the infrastructure environment which had encouraged the present position.
The report warned against enshrining into regulation prices and strategies based on the qualities of a limited number of existing technologies.
The high use of electronic banking interfaces - ATM machines and Eftpos terminals - although not driven by the Internet, was a "significant indicator of not just New Zealanders' preparedness for, but their significant practical uptake of, electronic commerce".
The study singled out the lack of skilled people as one of New Zealand's biggest handicaps in making technological progress.
"Significant emigration of skilled personnel in the scientific, technical and managerial sectors, apparently flat and low levels of patent registration in an international environment where patent registering activity is increasing, and uncertainty in policy treatments of research and development activities raise significant causes for concern."