I-WAYS,Digest of Electronic Commerce Policy and Regulation: Journal of E-Governance (I-Ways changed its name to Journal of E-Governance in 2009. Journal of E-Governance was discontinued in 2013)

In Brazil, a poor telecommunication infrastructure was considered an important barrier for e-business diffusion. However, from 1998, when the telecom system was privatized, to 2000, telecom investments boosted to an average of 1.36% of GNP a year, a percentage well above both Brazilian and Latin American historical levels. There is now idle capacity and telecommunication infrastructure is no longer considered a major barrier for e-commerce. Brazil's financial sector is the clear leader in adopting information technologies, and is widely considered the leading user of the Internet for marketing, online sales, and service and support. The sum of the survey results suggests that the financial sector has capitalized on its experience with IT in order to adopt e-commerce technologies and to integrate them with existing information systems.

E-commerce in Brazil is strongly anchored in information intensive sectors little affected by foreign transactions. Local forces seem to play a more influential role due to Brazil's unique economic history and government policies. For e-commerce diffusion, a factor more important than the sector itself is the scale of information flow among various agents within the economy. Information-intensity is, in part, related to the size of the business. The larger the firm, the easier it obtains scale benefits of digital services. However, some activities demand more information exchange than others. Distribution and finance face similar driving forces for e-commerce diffusion, but are different from manufacturing. The manufacturing industry is driven to achieve, by cost reduction, through inventory reduction and improved logistics. But while productivity growth is the most important driving force for manufacturing, the finance and distribution sectors focus on opportunities to expand and improve their relationships with clients.

The Internet is increasing the intensity of competition rather than the number of competitors. Whereas in the recent past e-commerce was dominated by new companies, nowadays-existing market leaders seem to be rapidly gaining business through the new channel. Strong links between users and producers of IT solutions facilitate technological leadership. The case study on the banking industry showed that internal technological capabilities were key for e-commerce leadership, since they enhanced the user-producer links providing capabilities that are flexible and tailored to specific needs. Legal protection is a more important barrier than expected. This includes lack of business laws for e-commerce and inadequate legal protection for Internet purchases, barriers affecting more than 40% of the surveyed Brazilian firms.

The most important driver behind e-commerce in Taiwan appears to be international competitive pressure; this is especially evident in the manufacturing sector. E-commerce is more widely diffused in the manufacturing sector in Taiwan, compared to the retail/wholesale and financial sectors, which are more domestic-market oriented. The primary motivating factor behind e-commerce adoption is to better serve customers, and the Internet also allows firms to improve the efficiency of their internal processes and to enhance staff productivity levels. In comparison with manufacturing firms in other countries, Taiwanese firms are more concerned with improving forward linkages to their customers than improving backward linkages to their suppliers.

The purpose of the adoption of e-commerce is predominantly to broaden their customer base by exploring new marketing channels, or to create competition for the traditional channels. This stands in sharp contrast to global firms, which tend to use it mainly to improve the traditional marketing channels.

E-commerce began in Mexico in the early 1990s and has already extended into the main sectors of the economy, generating from its inception high optimism in both business and government circles. A number of factors, though, have dragged the process, which include a high degree of “informality” of the Mexican economy, a skewed income distribution, a traditional shopping culture, an also skewed business size structure, and a low level in the companies’ technological development and organization structures. Nonetheless, e-commerce has taken its hold in Mexico. A critical set of enabling factors have prevailed over inhibiting forces, which include the large presence of multinational corporations, the liberalization of the telecommunications industry, the improvement of the country's telecommunications infrastructure, the creation of a basic legal framework, and the emergence of both e-banking and e-government. All indicates that such overall balance will continue to hold in the foreseeable future, so that the development of e-commerce in Mexico stands as a lasting phenomenon that may eventually lead to the rise of an economy significantly based on the Internet and other digital technologies, not just to the formation of an isolated “e-sector”. The GEC survey discussed in this paper revealed that as much as 74 per cent of the business establishments included in the study use the Internet by for commercial purposes. This figure is far larger than the ones estimated on the basis of e-commerce revenues for the country as a whole, and thus changes the usual perception that e-commerce in Mexico has grown only to a limited extent. Accordingly, business establishments operating in Mexico outperform those in other countries included in the GEC survey regarding key aspects such as the use of e-mail, the construction and management of websites, the deployment and operation of EDI networks, and the improvement in their competitiveness, efficiency, and productivity.

In a fundamental finding of this study, finance was found to be the most advanced sector in e-commerce adoption and development in Mexico. Financial firms and banking institutions proved to be the most globalized companies, the ones that use most extensively the Internet and Internet-based technologies for commercial purposes, the most advanced in systems integration, and the ones that spend the highest proportions of their operating budget in information systems. Conversely, and contrary to expectations, manufacturing establishments turned out to be the least advanced sector regarding e-commerce adoption and development, with distribution companies lying in the middle. The influence of size does not follow a regular pattern across all the sectors and aspects of e-commerce diffusion and impacts examined in this paper. Nonetheless, the size of business establishments does matter in most of those aspects. Five general propositions were tested with the results of the GEC survey, which condense the substance of the way e-commerce has developed in Mexico given the particular environmental factors playing out in this country: 1) global, more than domestic factors drive the spread of e-commerce in Mexico; 2) micro and small enterprises are the least likely to engage in e-commerce vis a vis larger establishments; 3) B-to-C e-commerce has grown more at the sectoral level than at that the national level; 4) government policies are essential for e-commerce growth; and, 5) the existence of an adequate legal framework is a crucial condition for e-commerce to develop. Propositions 1, 3, and 5 were confirmed, while 2 and 4 were only partially supported by the evidence provided by the GEC survey.