• BLOG SURF
As pandemic lockdowns spread across the globe, people increasingly looked to their computers, phones and other digital devices for work, school and everyday life. The global internet bandwidth increased by 35% in 2020, the largest one-year increase since 2013, according to UNCTAD's Digital Economy Report 2021, and by 29% in 2021, as per research firm TeleGeography.
Surprisingly, our research found that despite an observed increase in the use of digital platforms and the demand for digital technology-based products, the performance of the core digital sectors plummeted across several economies in 2020. This may be attributed to the economic downturn which adversely affected household purchasing capacity; and to supply chain issues that constrained production. While digital sectors generally declined with the overall economy, there were a few notable exceptions.
Despite its Gross Domesstic Product declining by 5.6 per cent, Malaysia's digital economy, driven by increased production of digital hardware, grew by nearly 3 per cent. -blog.adb.org/blogs
A version of this article appears in the print on February 8, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.
