RESEARCHERS: Kenneth L. Kraemer, Jason Dedrick, Nigel Melville, Sean Xin Xu, Kevin Zhu


This study compares the growth of e-commerce in ten countries: Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Taiwan and the United States. National experts from each country prepared case studies, which served as the basis for a cross-national firm-level survey conducted jointly with International Data Corporation (IDC). Data were collected from 2,100 firms and aggregated by industry and country.

This research examined the convergence hypothesis regarding the impacts of e-commerce — namely, that e-commerce would bring about a rapid, unprecedented business transformation leading to convergence across countries in the organization of economic activities. The case studies showed that there was considerable diversity in the extent and pattern of e-commerce growth within countries and industry sectors, due largely to differences in wealth, business activity, government policy and culture. The quantitative analysis showed that e-commerce growth was both far slower and more evolutionary than predicted. Developed countries led e-commerce adoption, with the more internationally oriented sectors of developing countries (manufacturing, trade) following close behind. The statistical analysis showed that there was convergence in upsteam activities, such as in global supply chains, but considerable divergence in downstream activities facing the customer.

Follow-on research continues to examine specific areas of e-commerce investment, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) in the context of manufacturing and banking.

The results were published in the book, Global E-Commerce and published in scholarly journals such as The Information Society, Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, and the European Journal of Information Systems.