ABSTRACT
Reflecting a growing recognition that IT can confer substantial benefits on developing as well as developed countries, numerous digital preparedness measures have emerged in the past ten years or so. They purport to measure a country’s readiness to adopt technologies such as the Internet and more often than not include a skills variable such as literacy, enrolment ratios and average years of schooling. 1 Recently, however, Schmidt and Stork (2008) have used household survey data in Africa and the concept of self-reported confidence levels as the dependent variable to suggest that existing measures of skills need to be replaced by highest educational attainment levels, and tertiary education in particular. The reason is that none of the above-mentioned concepts (such as literacy) shed much light on this newly advocated measure. But while this is a plausible argument and a useful advance in the literature, it fails to take into account other variables such as age at graduation and the date when this occurs, which I feel are essential to form an accurate measure of Internet skills across countries. Age is so important because it helps us decide how many of those with a university degree might actually possess these skills. 2
