Introduction

This Benchmarking system is jointly developed by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development. Technical development is carried out by the Institute of Software Technology & Interactive Systems of Vienna University of Technology. We gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support from the Government of Austria.

The Benchmarking Tool is an interactive web-based system consisting of two modules: MDG Benchmarking and ICT Benchmarking.

Module I: MDG benchmarking

This module enables end-users to compare their countries' progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals with that of others. Specifically, it allows users to carry out the following search functions:

  • End-user may select an MDG or related target and compare the entire range of indicators of one country with other countries.

  • End-user may compare a selected country within country-groups as defined by United Nations.

  • End-user may compare a selected country with countries in a selected income category (High , Upper middle, Lower middle, Low)

  •  End-user may compare the results with the following special groups: LDCs, LLDCs and SIDs.

  •  End-user may compare the statistics of the same country in different years.

Data source: United Nations Statistics Division.

  Module II: ICT Benchmarking.

This module is designed to assist policy-makers to assess their countries' ICT capabilities in terms of connectivity and ease of access and to compare them against those of other countries. Users can benchmark the performance of a selected country against other countries with regard to hardware and access, as measured by cellular mobile telephone subscribers, main telephone lines, internet users, internet hosts, total telephone subscribers per 100 inhabitants, PCs. In addition, it allows users to benchmark speed of Internet access as measured by upload speed, download speed, and the speed of access to selected search engines and government websites.

Data source: International Telecommunication Union