The Information Economy Report 2015, subtitled “Unlocking the Potential of E-commerce for Developing Countries”, was released on 24 March.

Its B2C E-commerce Index draws on data on Internet use, secure servers, credit card penetration and postal delivery. Assessing e commerce readiness can serve as a first step towards formulating a national e-commerce strategy.

The index includes 130 states of the world. Uzbekistan took the 78th place with index of 43.8. According to the report, 100% of population can receive mail to their home.

According to the UNCTAD, about 3.4% of population has credit cards. At the same time, this data based on information from 2011.

Share of population, which uses internet in Uzbekistan, makes up 36.5%, while number of secure servers per 1 million population – 35.3%.

According to a new UNCTAD B2C E-commerce Index included in the study, the highest e-commerce readiness is found in Luxembourg, Norway and Finland.

Among developing and emerging economies, the front-runners are all in East Asia, namely the Republic of Korea, Hong Kong (China) and Singapore (see table). Meanwhile, in terms of actual levels of online shopping, countries with large populations – such as Brazil, China and the Russian Federation – are performing better than predicted, suggesting that large markets facilitate e-commerce.

The UNCTAD underlined that global B2C e-commerce is valued at about US$1.2 trillion.