 Welcome to the ITU studio in Geneva where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today by Dr. Raoul Katz who is the director of business strategy research at Columbia Institute for teleinformation at Columbia University. Well Katz welcome to the studio. Thank you very much. Now I'd like to start off by talking about the fact that we're here at the WTIS 18. A lot of figures being banded about here about the impact of ICTs on the economy and society. From your research what's the impact of ICTs on the economy and society and is this impact the same globally and on an individual level or a country level? Yeah well there's a volume of evidence that actually points to the fact that it has been clearly established that ICT as a whole has an impact on the economy and on society. And when I mean volume of evidence I mean in terms of both econometric work, experimental work, even qualitative analysis being done internationally. The issue though is that because of the wealth of data that is becoming available right now we have the ability to start digging in further into particular groups of country which answers partially your second question in the sense that not all impact is uniform or homogeneous across the globe. In fact the more research we're conducting we understand that for instance fixed broadband is having a higher impact in the more advanced economies. We have an effect called the return to scale. The more advanced economies have higher or larger infrastructures on fixed broadband and therefore the economic effects are larger than in the emerging countries. On the other hand when you look at mobile broadband the effect is the reverse in the sense of the emerging countries. Emerging broadband has a larger effect, a higher effect economically than in the more advanced countries. We there have the reverse of these return to scale and we have a saturation effect whereby the higher the development of a country the lesser the impact that you're going to see in mobile broadband. Thus what you can see is that in the aggregate the technology such as broadband or ICTs in general having an impact you have to start digging on the specificities of every single country because differences appear in terms of level of economic development, level of a development of the infrastructure and the like by country. Let's talk about keeping track of numbers. Why is it important to keep track of numbers in the ICT sector after all many countries in our region saturation levels? Well yeah saturation is an interesting concept because even in those countries that you can say have reached an advanced level of penetration you still have a portion of the population that doesn't access the internet or that is served by networks and therefore covered by networks but do not necessarily use it. Thus it is important to continue tracking the numbers to understand precisely what happens to first those people in rural and isolated areas that don't have access to infrastructure which even in advanced economies could be in the United States for instance five percent of the population doesn't have access to broadband because the networks don't reach them. Secondly you need to understand those that are being served but do not use it. Why is it that they do not use it? Is it a problem of the lack of digital literacy? Is it a problem of affordability? So you need to understand that fact and then there's another factor that is important which relates to these fourth industrial revolution which has to do with what happens with the businesses that have access to the technology but you do not necessarily see the impact on their productivity because obviously the impact can be detected in large enterprises but not necessarily in small and medium enterprises and that is critical for economic growth as well. So still we have long weeks to go in terms of actually getting an understanding of these different phenomena for which data is critical. Let's talk a little bit more about data. 51.1% of the global population is now using the internet of the figures we announced last week. I just really wanted to find out from you what you think could encourage more countries and help more countries to bring more people online. In general the research indicates that there are three factors that drive broadband and internet usage. The first one is purely economic. If you don't have the means to afford the access to the internet by having a wireless broadband subscription or fixed broadband subscription at home obviously you know you don't have access service. The second one as I mentioned before is digital literacy. Even if you have the means if you don't have the ability to actually conduct searches and emails understand how the internet operates in terms of a user perspective obviously you're not going to use it. This is an important phenomena in disadvantaged populations and it's also important generationally. You know older people tend to have more difficulty in accessing the technology and the third is it's the cultural relevance. I don't access the internet because I don't see that the internet can provide me with content that is useful to my needs from a cultural standpoint. Information, entertainment, sociability, relational with other people. In the 50% maybe some of those conditions have been fulfilled but think about it we are in 49% still that we either have issues of affordability sort of like base of the pyramid kind of issues. We have issues of literacy from a digital standpoint. How do we teach people to actually use the technology and then local development in local languages. I'll give you a statistic that is quite interesting. If you look for instance on Wikipedia which is essentially a public good where people access the site to get an understanding like a dictionary for instance 3% of the articles written in Wikipedia are in Spanish and Spanish today is being spoken by over 600 million people around the world. So if you don't speak English you cannot use Wikipedia and you have to develop those articles that that content in a language that is accessible to the people that actually don't have another option. Absolutely. Finally talking about messages, language, etc. What key message do you think participants will be taking away from this year's symposium? I believe that so far the if I were to emphasize this is critical policy matters. Policy matters in terms of developing the performance of the sector. I try to emphasize that point in my presentation. Policies related to the ICT sector are critical and in order to develop the appropriate policies you have to have good appropriate data analysis. I think so far there are a couple of things that have come up is the need to actually navigate the ecosystem of information in order to find the appropriate data to develop those policies and to conduct the right analysis and also equip policy makers with the technical capacity in house in these internal administrative units with the regulators or ministries of ICTs with the capacity to conduct those analysis or at least ascertain the quality and the rigor of the analysis that are being conducted by outside parties. I think that those elements are critical right now going forward. Roeke, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.