The information economy in South Africa: definition and measurement

Abstract

Most Western economies have already achieved or are progressing towards information economy status. South Africa's progress towards an information economy has not yet been ascertained. An attempt was made to develop a framework for describing and demarcating the information economy in South Africa. This framework ties in with avail able national data. The basic methods of measuring the infor mation economy were established, the first to determine the number of information workers and second to measure the contribution of the information sector to the gross domestic product (GDP). According to Porat's [2] method, there were approximately two million information workers in South Africa in the late 1980s. If the generation and use of information are excluded from the description of the information sector, there were about 400,000 people working in the information sector in the 1980s. The contribution of the information sector to the GDP was about six per cent in the late 1980s. The gross operating surplus, a rough estimate