Towards an Information Society: The State of the Arab Countries

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Arab countries are progressing in developing information society and how they differ in their efforts to build an information society. The researchers are interested to know if there is any relationship between ICT Development Index (IDI) and ICT Price Basket (IPB), as well as the relationship between Gross National Index (GNI) and IDI. The study adopted IDI, GNI, and IPB indicators used by the International Telecommunication Unit (ITU) in 2011. The researchers divided the Arab countries into four groups: GCC, Levant, Magreb, and other Arab countries. Findings indicate a significant progress of the Arab countries, particularly the GCC countries, in developing information society. Results of the study show that countries with relatively high ICT price have relatively low levels of ICT access and use. Similarly, the analysis of the study found that a high GNI for a country results in a high ICT Development Index and vice versa.


Introduction
The use of the term 'info rmation society' may be traced back to 1959 when Drucker first mentioned "knowledge worker" [1]. Machlup also made a serious attempt to describe informat ion society in the US by investigating production and distribution of knowledge [2]. Similar studies were found in Eu rope by studying a shift fro m goods-based society to informat ion-based society [3]. Earlier literature show no clear definit ion for the term "info rmation society" [1], [4][5][6]. Today, most of the scholars and policy makers believe that the advent of information and commun ication technologies play an important role in building and developing information society [1], [5], [7].
An information society is "a society where work, economic transactions, commun ications, information sharin g, developing relationships, and interactions involving individuals, organizations, governments, and communities are conducted via in format ion and co mmunicat ion technolo gy (ICT)" [1, p.70]. The concept implies an assumption that informat ion society is different fro m other types of societies [4].
Following the steps of developed countries, developing nations place high considerations on ICT in build ing in fo rm ation society and th e A rab countries are no except ions.
Policies of governments through the websites of the ministries, speeches and reports in the Arab world emphasize on developing strategies to become a better information society [8], [9]. For instance, a report by Al-Sudairy in 2010 shows that all the GCC countries have their national ICT strategies and are in the process of establishing the necessary legislative structure to modernize and develop ICT in the government sectors, research and development, education, health and commerce [10]. The main purpose of this paper is to examine, analy ze and report the progress of the Arab countries in developing informat ion society. For this purpose the International Teleco mmunication (ITU) report entitled "Measuring informat ion society 2011" was used and provided sufficient facts and information. For the purpose of comparisons, we divided the Arab countries into four sub-regions as listed in Table 1.
The study attempts to investigate the following hypotheses: H1. There are no differences among sub-regions of the Arab countries in regard to the ICT Price basket (IPB).
H2. There are no significant differences among sub-regions of the Arab countries in regard to the level of ICT access and use. H3. There is no relat ionship between ICT Develop ment index and ICT Price Basket of the Arab countries.
H4. There is no relat ionship between GNI and ICT Develop ment Index of the Arab countries. The paper elucidates the nature of commit ment of the Arab countries towards developing informat ion society. Results of the study may help understand current efforts and success of the Arab nations in developing information society.

ICT Development Index (IDI) and ICT Price Basket (IPB)
The report of International Telecommun ication (ITU) entitled "Measuring informat ion society 2011" features two key benchmarking tools to measure an informat ion society: the ICT Develop ment Index (IDI) and the ICT Price Basket (IPB). The IDI captures the level of ICT developments in 152 countries and compares progress made during the past ten years. On the other hand, the IPB co mb ines fixed telephone, mobile cellular and fixed broadband Internet tariffs of 165 countries into one measure and compares them across countries and over time.
The IDI and IPB are impo rtant in determin ing the progress of the countries in developing information society. This study is needed for setting-up baseline figures and benchmarks in measuring progress towards developing informat ion society in the Arab world. The sub-regions of the Arab countries with their ranks in the ITU report are presented in Table 4.
ICT Develop ment Index (IDI) is a useful tool to benchmark and track the overall p rogress of countries towards informat ion society. The IDI is a co mposite index made up of 11 indicators covering ICT access, use and skills as shown in Table 2. It has been constructed to measure the level and evolution over t ime of ICT develop ments, taking into consideration, in this study, the situations of the sub-regions of the Arab countries.
ICT is one of the most important indicators for the economic gro wth. In the case of the Arab countries, the ICT usage has been linked to economic factors [7]. As a comprehensive benchmarking tool, the IPB monitors the relative price of ICT services and provides indications of how affordable are services across countries and over time. The IPB indicators used in this study are presented in Tab le 3.

Findings and Discussion
This section discusses IDI ranking for the Arab countries, fixed-telephone, mobile-cellular, fixed broadband of the Arab countries in 2008 and 2010. It also presents and tests four hypotheses stated in the introduction.

IDI Ranking of the Arab Countries
The Arab countries differ in the IDI values. These differences can be attributed to the income levels of each individual country. The values of the IDI in the Arab countries are ranging widely between 1.8 and 6.19; fro m which we observed that countries with h igh-inco me are on the top among the other Arab countries. More details about the ranking of IDI in the Arab countries are p resented in Table 4. Th is table shows that the overall average of IDI has increased fro m 3.04 in 2008 to 3.57 in 2010. Precisely we found that both Mauritania and Djibouti lost five positions in 2010 IDI ranking as compared to 2008 figures. On the other hand, Morocco, Oman and Saudi Arabia recorded the highest progress in ranking between 8 to 10 positions.

Fi xe d-Telephone
Data of fixed-telephone sub-basket are presented in Table  5. The sub-basket for 2010 includes the price of the monthly subscription plus 30 local calls -half peak time and half off-peak t ime -of three minutes each [7]. In 2008, the average fixed-telephone sub-basket for the Arab countries corresponds to 4.2 per cent of monthly GNI per cap ita as compared to 4.1 in 2010, reflecting a decrease of 0.1 per cent.
Three of the top five countries with lowest fixed-telephone sub-basket tariffs are members of the GCC countries with high-inco me economics, these countries are UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. Syria and Tunisia came in the fourth and fifth position respectively despite being among the moderate income countries compared to Qatar and Oman which came in the sixth and seventh order.
Meanwhile the top five countries with expensive fixed-telephone tariffs in the Arab wo rld are found in the low-inco me countries. These are Mauritania, Co moros, Morocco, Djibouti, and Jordan. It should be noted that, the above five countries, except Mauritania, reported a decrease of fixed-telephone price between 0.

Mobile-Cellul ar
Data of mobile-cellular sub-basket are presented in Table  6. The sub-basket for 2010 includes the price of 30 outgoing calls for peak, off-peak and weekend periods and to the same and other mobile and fixed networks plus 100 SM S [7]. In 2008, the average mobile-cellular sub-basket for the Arab countries was 8.1 per cent of the monthly GNI per capita as compared to 7.5 in 2010. This means that the mobile-cellular sub-basket costs decreased in 2010 by an average of 0.6 per cent as compared with 2008.
GCC countries appeared on the top of Table 6 with lowest mobile-cellular sub-basket cost. However, Qatar is the only GCC country which increased mobile-cellu lar sub-basket tariffs fro m 1.

Fi xed Broadband
Data for the fixed Broadband sub-basket are presented in Table 7. In 2008, the average broadband sub-basket for the Arab countries corresponds to 75.4 per cent of monthly GNI per capita as compared to 49.9 in 2010. This means the fixed broadband sub-basket decreased in 2010 by an average of 25.5 per cent as compared with 2008.
Four of the top five countries with lowest fixed broadband sub-basket are members of the GCC countries which have high-inco me economics. These countries are UA E, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Oman. Tunisia came in the fifth position despite being among the moderate inco me countries compared to Qatar wh ich took the tenth position among sixteen Arab countries.
Meanwhile, the most expensive fixed broadband tariffs countries in the Arab world are Co moros, Yemen, Djibouti, Mauritania, and Syria. It should be noted that, the last five countries registered decrease of fixed broadband tariffs, in 2010, between 47.7 to 156.4 per cent. Five countries with a moderate tariff price; Lebanon, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan; registered a decrease of fixed broadband between 0.6 to 4.1 per cent in 2010. Again, the tariff remains stable for Qatar with no change from 2008 to 2010.   9 for the other Arab countries. On the hand, the standard deviation of the GCC countries is very small (0.88713) co mpared to the other Arab sub-regions. This indicates that there are no significant differences among the GCC countries in regards to the cost of ICT services. In contrast, high standard deviations, which reached up to 17.25341 for the other Arab sub-regions reveal significant differences among the countries in these sub-regions. Regionally, this may indicates that telecommunication and Internet services in the Arab countries are becoming mo re affordable.

ICT Development Index
The ICT Develop ment Index (IDI) in the Arab countries has significantly increased for the year 2010 as co mpared with the year 2008 as shown in Figure 1. The very small p-value in Table 9.b wh ich presents the paired samples t-test (p value <0.05) confirms this result as shown in Table 9.a. This table shows that the average of IDI in 2008 (3.034) is significantly d ifferent fro m the average of the IDI in 2010 (3.565) for the Arab countries. Figure 1 confirms this result which shows that the IDI index in the GCC countries is much higher than that in the rest of the Arab countries. Clearly there is an important heterogeneity in the ICT development across the Arab countries. Further analysis shows that high-income countries are associated with higher intensity level of ICT Develop ment. For examp le, the IDI level for UA E is 6.19, while this level is around 5.5 for Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. Levant region itself reflects different patterns of diffusion, both between and within countries. Sub-regionally, Lebanon shows higher level of ICT Development than the other non-Gulf countries (see Figure 1). For instance, considering the ITU's ICT Develop ment Index (IDI) ranks presented in Table 4, Jordan and Lebanon are the better ranked of the Levant countries in 2010 (ran king 73 and 79 respectively), while Yemen is by far the worst ranked (127) after Syria 96.  The multip le co mparison results of the PostHoc test, presented in Table 10, shows significant differences among the averages of IDI index of at least two sub-regions of countries in the Arab world. According to these results (p value <0.05), there is a statistical significance in the level of ICT access and use in the GCC sub-region and each one of the other Arab sub-regions.

Relationship between IDI and IPB
A comparison of the IPB prices with the IDI index of the Arab countries, presented in Figure 2, shows that countries with relatively high ICT Develop ment Index (IDI) have relatively low level of ICT access and use. These results is in line with the ITU findings [7]. The year 2010's IPB figures of the Arab reg ion reveal a close link between the affordability of ICT services and national inco me levels. People of the high-inco me countries pay relatively little for the ICT services; wh ile those in the world's poorest countries pay relatively mo re. Figure 3 shows that people liv ing in the GCC countries pay the lowest prices for the ICT services. There are almost moderate prices in the Levant and Magreb sub-regions except for Yemen and Mauritania. In the sub-region of the other Arab countries, mainly Djibouti and Co moro Island, the prices are so expensive to reach as high as USD50 co mpared to USD2 for the GCC sub-region. For fu rther investigation, we performed analysis of variance to find out the differences among different Arab sub-regions (GCC, Levant, Magreb and the other Arab countries). The ANOVA table (Tab le 11) shows that significant differences exist among different sub-regions of the Arab world in the ICT Develop ment Index as well as in the IPB price basket, with p value <0.05.

Relationship between GNI and IDI
As shown in Figure 4, there is a strong relationship between Gross National Income (GNI) and ICT Develop ment Index (IDI). The Pearson correlation coefficient (r = 0.78) confirms this result. This indicates that a high GNI for a country will result in a high ICT Develop ment Index; wh ile the low GNI for a country will result in lo w ICT Development Index.

Conclusions
Based on the ITU data [7] used in this study, our findings prove that the Arab countries have achieved, in 2010, a significant progress towards developing information society. This progress can easily be noticed in the GCC countries than the rest of Arab countries. Similarly, results of the study found significant differences among the Arab countries in regard to the ICT Price Basket (IPB). The average of the price for the ICT services in the GCC countries is the lowest, in 2010, as compared to the other Arab countries. This might be because the GCC countries have strong economic and better ICT develop ment strategies than the other Arab countries. Findings of the study show a relationship between ICT Development Index (IDI) and ICT Price Basket (IPB). That means countries with relatively h igh ICT cost have relatively lo w levels of ICT access and use. These findings are in line with the ITU report in 2011 [7]. Similarly, the analysis of the study found a strong relationship between Gross National Inco me (GNI) and ICT Develop ment Index (IDI), which means a high GNI for a country will result in a high ICT Development Index; and vice versa. Finally, since this study is based on ICT, IPB and GNI indicators, there is a need for conducting further studies to include more indicators in measuring information society of the Arab countries.