1. Introduction
1.1 Information Included
This is the seventh annual release of the Ministry of Economic Development's (previously, the Ministry of Commerce) information paper on IT statistics in New Zealand. This paper includes:
- figures for IT hardware imports and exports updated either for the 1999 calendar year, or to March 1999;
- figures for trade in software and services and the size of the New Zealand information technology (IT) market updated to March 1999;
- figures for employment in segments of the IT industry from the 1996 census (repeated from previous reports);
- information on the numbers of computers in New Zealand homes compared with a selection of other electronic amenities;
- information on the size of the Internet in New Zealand and the number of World Wide Web sites updated to February 2000;
- information on the number of computers and Internet connections in New Zealand schools updated from a 1999/2000 survey of IT in Schools;
- a new section providing information about the number of students enrolled in IT related courses in New Zealand universities, based on a survey carried out by the Ministry of Economic Development over the 1999/2000 summer.
1.2 Acknowledgements
Information in this paper has been derived mainly from public sources, or from specially commissioned surveys by Statistics New Zealand, the Ministry of Economic Development or the Information Technology Advisory Group. References and sources are detailed in Section 9.
Special acknowledgement is made of the statistics and other information about the Internet in New Zealand collected and made available by Mark Davies of Victoria University of Wellington.
1.3 Defining Information Technology
Information technology is now acknowledged to be much broader than the traditional computing and data processing industry and is taken here to include telecommunications and broadcasting.
Back to Top