ICTs in Latin America: An overview, Rodrigo Santos

RODRIGO SANTOS

Pretoria

Workshop; nd IFIP International Symposium on Wireless Communications and Information Technology in Developing Countries; 2008

IFIP

In this paper, the state-of-the-art on the field ofInformation and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in LatinAmerica is presented. Its main contribution consists in the localizationof common objectives for the majority of the countriesin the region. Although the countries are very heterogeneousfrom the cultural and geographical perspectives, there are manycommon factors that can be exploited in order to develop theireconomies. At first sight, Brazil or Mexico with their hugepopulations and big economies are giants compared to othercountries like Bolivia or Costa Rica. However there are manycommon problems in all of them that can be addressed with acommon strategy. An important question that this presentationtries to answer is the ICT profile of Latin America: consumeror producer. Data from the World Bank on ICT infrastructureand from the academic sector on the actual situation of the R&Dactivities in the region are analyzed to answer this question.