The Impact of It Development on International Relations : An Empirical Examination for Policy Choice

Abstract

This research explores the impact of IT development, as measured by the Information Society Index (ISI), on the competitiveness of nations in international relations. It is hypothesized that variation in the power of the major sectors such as IT and economic development, inequality, and social status affects variation in nation's competitiveness. Multivariate analysis confirms this hypothesis. The result shows that IT development as a weight of the ISI index and economic development interact to produce a positive impact on the changes in international relations when the effects of other conditions are held constant. This finding, moreover, holds up after additional investigation for possible OLS assumption violations, sample dependence of results, and model misspecification. The implication is that IT development suggests a complex dynamic of international relations between convergence and diversity via future track of cyber democracy with the norm that authority for operation be decentralized.