Assessing the Impacts of Electronic Commerce Diffusion on Development

While the concept of economic development has been widely used to understand the health and wealth of countries, it is accepted that the access to the internet for electronic commerce transactions enable generation in income and improvements in lives. However, with the rise of disparities in income within countries, electronic commerce opportunities can be limited to the few with internet access. In this paper, we investigate how e-commerce diffusion affects economic development and factors of electronic commerce diffusion that promote or impede economic development. Using data available through international data collection agencies, we analyze three ASEAN members with relatively close GNI as of 2013 as well as three countries with largely high GNI as of 2013. The contribution of this paper is in understanding the impact of electronic commerce diffusion on development

E-commerce as a Vehicle Towards Sustainable National Development in Nigeria: Prospects and Challenges

The emergence of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has created a lot of opportunities for its end users, globally. However, despite the recognized embedded benefits of e-commerce, its utilization for sustainable national development in Nigeria is still largely low. On this basis, this paper discusses the prospect of e-commerce as a vehicle towards sustainable national development in Nigeria, and the challenges militating against its adequate adoption. The Diffusion of Innovation Theory was employed as conceptual framework. The paper argues that e-commerce can contribute in multiple ways to the actualization of the Nigeria’s drive towards the attainment of sustainable national development through the improvement of the Nigerian banking sector, the promotion of indigenous entrepreneurship, increase in foreign exchange, and the development of small and medium scale businesses. However, despite its embedded advantages, digital divide, illiteracy, skepticism/distrust, fear of cybercrime exposure and poor access to relevant information are among the major challenges militating against the successful adoption of electronic commerce in Nigeria. The Nigerian Government should exert more efforts towards effective domestication of E-commerce because it is capable of contributing significantly to the successful actualization of the nation’s vision 2020 plan and the attainment of its sustainable development goals