BRITAIN has climbed up the league table of countries attempting to ride the internet revolution but America has slipped back, a worldwide study of information technology use has shown.

A report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) revealed that Britain has risen to twelfth place in the world in terms of “networked readiness”, a measure of how well countries are exploiting developments in information and communications technology (ICT). Last year Britain came fifteenth.

Lower levels of regulation on business was the main cause, along with increasing levels of subsidies for research and development, the WEF said.

But the study showed that Britain still had further to go; it came only eighteenth in the world in levels of broadband usage, despite rapid increases in the availability of the technology. The report also placed Britain 56th in the availability of its public payphones.

Singapore topped the networked-readiness list overall, thanks to widespread government initiatives to foster ICT use and the quality of its education system.

But the United States was knocked off its pedestal, dropping to fifth place this year after three years at the top of the poll. The report said that the superpower still scored highly for its research institutions and business schools but other countries had caught up with its widespread penetration of new technologies.

Many of those countries were in Scandinavia. Iceland, the remotest country in Europe, came second, followed by Finland, Denmark and Sweden in third, fourth and sixth place respectively.

Augusto Lopez-Claros, the WEF’s chief economist, who edited the report, said: “The Nordic countries have managed to nurture a climate in which innovation is very much part of the business environment and their countries’ culture.”

He said that high levels of education also aided the take-up of new technology.

South Korea came at the top of the list for broadband usage. Mr Lopez-Claros said there were more broadband users in South Korea than in the whole of South America.

The study monitored 104 countries in a range of categories, marking their business environments, ICT readiness and levels of usage. Chad came last in the study, behind Nicaragua and Ethiopia. Among the major economies, Russia notably underperformed, coming 62nd, virtually unchanged from the previous year.

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