Electronic Commerce Index (B2C E-commerce)

UNCTAD is the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

---

This UN division issues an annual report whose main theme is electronic commerce, where the different types of trade are analyzed:

• Companies - Companies
• Companies - Consumers
• Consumers - Consumers

Based on these data, the Electronic Commerce Index (B2C E-commerce) is created, which focuses on trade between companies and consumers as an instrument to measure the levels of adoption in E-commerce by the countries of the world, evaluating 4 main indicators, which are selected from the level of internet access by consumers, the receipt of the order by a server, payment method, and the order delivery method.

---

In the latest UNCTAD report, dated February 17, 2021, Switzerland occupied first place in the ranking for the first time, followed by the Netherlands, Denmark, Singapore, United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Norway, and Hong Kong. While Venezuela was ranked 90.

In Latin America, Costa Rica and Chile were the best-positioned economies on the list, occupying 56th and 59th places respectively.

UNCTAD highlighted that Latin America represents 9% of the world population and 11% of Internet users, representing 6% of global online buyers.

Venezuela

We could consider this report as an instrument to measure the progress of underdeveloped countries in terms of technology adoption, which also leads us to think about their progress in the democratization of internet access and education in general.

In 2016, the UN declared Internet access as a Human Right. Based on this, we can deduce how things are progressing in these nations in terms of equality and respect for the basic rights of people.

_Source

According to a study carried out by Speedtest Global Index, the South American nation is the country with the worst connection in the entire continent. Just 3.67 Mbps. This makes it one of the least capable in the world. Speedtest Global Index is a portal that measures the speed of the Internet.
_Source

We must bear in mind that the results of the latest UNCTAD report were obtained with data from 2019. Therefore, this report does not reflect the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It would be very interesting to see the next report, which should be obtained from the data for the year 2020. There we can see that all the indexes will be considerably exceeded since the confinement caused a large increase effect in the field of E-commerce.