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The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) introduced the Technology Achievement Index (TAI) to reflect a country's capacity to participate in the technological innovations of the network age. The TAI aims to capture how well a country is creating and diffusing technology and building a human skill base. It includes the following dimensions: Creation of technology (e.g. patents, royalty receipts); diffusion of recent innovations (Internet hosts/capita, high & medium tech exports as share of all exports); Diffusion of old innovations (log phones/capita, log of electric consumption/capita); Human skills (mean years of schooling, gross enrollment in tertiary level in science, math & engineering). the Figure below shows December 2003's derived throughput measured from the U.S. vs. the TAI. The correlation is seen to be positive and medium to good. The US and Canada are excluded since the losses are not accurately measurable by PingER and the RTT is small. Hosts in well connected countries such as Finland, Sweden, Japan also have their losses poorly measured by PingER and since they have long RTTs the derived throughput is likely to be low using the Mathis formula and if no packets are lost then assuming a loss of 0.5 packets in the 14,400 sent to a host in a month.
Comparison
Comparison of TCP Throughput with Digital Access Index
DAI indicates - Avalibility of Infrastructure - Affordibility of access - Education Level - Quality of ICT services - Internet Usage
Since the PingER Derived Throughput is linearly proportional to RTT, countries close to the U.S. (i.e. the U.S., Canada and Mexico) may be expected to have elevated Derived Throughputs compared to their DAI. We thus do not use the U.S. and Canada and Mexico in the correlation fit.
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