Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Road'' (Davison et al.
2003
). Still a predominantly cash-based economy, Central
Asia nonetheless has witnessed a steady growth in electronic payment systems.
Wireless broadband, for example, has grown steadily in Almaty. Such a
phenomenon has, perhaps inevitably, integrated Central Asian economies with
neighboring states. Digital connections between merchants straddling the border of
Kazakhstan and Xinjang, for example, have proliferated. A new logistics center in
Urumqi is streamlining paperwork for trans-border trade by using electronic
documents. Moreover, many localities have turned to the web to promote the
region's flourishing tourist industry; the Novinomad website (novinomad.com), for
example, a Swiss-Kyrgyz joint venture, promotes ecotourism in that part of the
world. Central Asian telephony has seen the growth of Voice Over Internet
Protocal (VOIP) traffic. In Kyrgyzstan, ISPs seeking to provide this service must
contribute
20 million som
($US 517,000)
to
a
national
telecommunications
development fund.
4.7.11 Oceania
Australian e-commerce was estimated at $57 billion in 2007. B2B has increasingly
become a necessity for Australian firms, where it is restructuring procurement
systems and buyer-supplier relations (Singh and Byrne
2005
). Whereas large,
internationally-oriented firms have taken the lead, e-commerce adoption has
gradually come to include a variety of smaller enterprises, which haltingly have
come to see the benefits of electronic transactions (Hallal et al.
2010
). The Aus-
tralian e-tail market, at 3 % of sales, is still undeveloped compared to other OECD
countries (Access Economics
2010
). Similarly, in New Zealand, B2B adoption is
largely a function of CEO innovativeness, organization size, and the degree of
support from technology vendors (Al-Qirim
2005
).
Internet-based schooling in the Pacific Ocean is increasingly popular. For
example, the University of the South Pacific, which serves 12 countries in the
region, uses Internet-based courses extensively; similarly, the Fiji School of
Medicine trains health professionals through telehealth programs (Toland and
Purcell
2002
; Gold et al.
2002
).
4.8 Conclusions
E-commerce takes a wide variety of forms, which play out unevenly across the
planet's surface. As this chapter has demonstrated, the ascendency of electronic
money has reinforced, not negated, the strategic position of global cities in the
world economy. Between and among centers of finance, digital money sloshes in
astounding volumes, circulating at the speed of light and wreaking havoc with
national monetary controls. While high value-added functions such as investment
