The emergence and penetration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Asia and the Pacific has now become evident. Impacts of ICT on people’s everyday life and on societies of the region have pushed governments and the civil society in the region to design and implement adequate policy and decision-making on issues related to the development and transformation of Asian and Pacific countries and areas in information societies.

As in many other fields of development, the best assurance for policies to work is to have them based on objective and useful quantitative and qualitative information. Therefore, ICT statistics, going beyond the simpler measurement of infrastructural aspects, opens its boundaries to include a large array of statistical indicators and tries to present such statistical information in a coherent and policy-relevant framework.

UNESCAP recognized the statistical needs emerging in this field and decided to work on initiatives designed to support its members in this field of work. These web pages are one of such efforts. These web pages are designed to serve as sharing platform of methodological information for countries of Asia and the Pacific.

The Asia-Pacific ICT Technical Meetings are a spontaneous initiative of official statisticians in countries or areas of Asia and the Pacific who aim to initiate a form of sharing of information in the field of ICT statistics.

The quality of technical materials and documents exchanged at these meetings can be valuable for many agencies and national statistical offices charged to work on ICT statistics. UNESCAP was asked to host on its web site these documents to make them available to a wider public.

The third and last meeting of this kind was held in Wellington, New Zealand, from 30 November to 2 December 2004.

Go to the Asia-Pacific ICT Technical Meeting, Wellington, 2004

Go to the Asia-Pacific Technical Meeting on IT&T Statistics, Hong Kong, China, 2002

Go to the Ad-hoc Technical Meeting of Asia-Pacific Statisticians on IT&T Statistics, Brisbane, 2001

Formerly known as the Asia Pacific Technical Meeting on IT&T Statistics, the previous two such meetings were previously held in Brisbane, Australia, in 2000 and in Hong Kong, China, in 2002. Documents of these two previous events will be posted in this web site in the near future.

The Partnership for Measuring ICT for Development was formed by a group of international and regional organizations aiming to promote the development of ICT statistics.

UNESCAP is a member partner and its programme of work on ICT statistics is closely linked to the Partnership.

Activities of the Partnership are described at the following URL:
http://measuring-ict.unctad.org