ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 1990s, fewer than 3 million people world-wide used the internet and its commercial application was non-existent. A decade later, the number of people with access to the internet had grown to more than 300 million and approximately one quarter of users made purchases online from electronic commerce sites, worth in excess of US$ 110 billion (Organisation for Economic and Co-operation and Development [OECD] 2000,3). Although it is difficult to quantify, this figure is expected to leap to more than US$730 billion by 2004. This would represent about 5 percent of total global business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) sales.1 Conservative estimates expect fivefold growth in e-commerce and e-business during the first half of this decade and the most optimistic forecasts are for a tenfold increase (p. 25). Modem managers cannot ignore such figures. The electronic economy has therefore forced a transformation in the structure and strategy of many so-called ‘old economy’ companies, as well as stimulating the emergence of a wide range of ‘new economy’ companies. Moreover, the economic significance of the ‘electronic economy’, or e-conomy, together with its social and technological ramifications and its transborder nature, has generated significant debate about the role of government in the new ‘marketspace’. These twin challenges — to business and to government — form the focal point of this chapter.
