The United Nations hopes to persuade high-tech giants at the World Economic Forum not to let the collapse of the dot.com bubble compromise hopes of bridging the digital divide between rich and poor nations, a top UN official said.
"Those of us who are proselytizing this idea will probably find the argument harder to make this year than it was last year," said the administrator of the UN Development Program (UNDP), Mark Malloch-Brown, before leaving for Davos, Switzerland, on Friday.
Malloch-Brown was to join UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and about 30 heads of state and government, dozens of ministers and 1,200 corporate leaders at the six-day annual forum.
In an interview with AFP, he said the shake-up in the world of information technology -- summarized in the 39.3 percent drop in the Nasdaq index last year -- would probably make IT leaders more cautious about investing in developing countries.
But, he said, it was possible to take an optimistic view.
"You could say that since the western bubble has burst, it's time to look at slower, harder-to-build but longer-term markets in the developing world."
Malloch-Brown pointed out that the firms represented at Davos were "first division companies who have gone through a year of reduced profits and lower stock prices ... but who are not struggling for survival."
He mentioned Hewlett Packard, Cisco Systems and AOL as companies which were helping the UN "to build an array of catalytic pilot projects to demonstrate the utility and value of IT" in developing countries.
Before last year's Millennium Summit, Annan called on IT leaders to join efforts to bridge the digital divide and help achieve the UN's aim of halving within 15 years the proportion of the world's population living on less than a dollar day.
The summit -- the largest gathering of world leaders in history -- endorsed Annan's assertion that "the central challenge we face today is to ensure that globalisation becomes a positive force for all the world's people."
Malloch-Brown said UNDP had promised the Group of Eight leading industrial countries that it would produce a plan for bridging the digital divide before the next G-8 summit, due to be held in the Italian port city of Genoa this summer.
A key element would be to identify "policies that would allow a rush of private investment into the ICT sector in developing countries," he said.
"The strategic view remains that, while there is a role for public capital in creating new telecommunications infrastructure, or a modern hi-tech sector, it will be largely privately financed," he added.
In Sri Lanka on Sunday, Annan said that "too often, state monopolies charge exorbitant prices for the use of bandwidths," and urged governments to create "investment-friendly environments".
Malloch-Brown said developing countries also faced competition from rich nations in the IT labor market.
Japanese officials said this month that they might relax immigration controls for foreign IT engineers to keep pace with demand, and a Swedish government report last week warned that, although IT accounted for 25 percent of economic growth and for 40 percent of all new jobs created in the 1990s, Sweden did not have enough specialized manpower.
"We are seeing some kind of renewed brain drain," Malloch-Brown said, "but we are also seeing new IT business going to developing economies that didn't go to them before." -- UNITED NATIONS (AFP)
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