Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo credit: Ahron de Leeuw/Flickr.

The Tau Index, a means of measuring which countries are spending most aggressively in ICT, reveals that less developed nations are spending proportionately more money than their more developed counterparts.

The Index was created in 2010 by Roger Strukhoff, the executive editor (Asia) of the Cloud Computing Journal. When describing his reasoning for creating the Tau Index he said: “It's easy enough to find the countries with the world's largest IT budgets, but tougher to find which are being the most aggressive with respect to the size of their population and economy.”

The Tau Index allows you to do this by balancing national ICT expenditures with local per capita income, local cost-of-living, and income disparity. The findings reveal that smaller, less developed countries such as Bangladesh, Morocco and Senegal all spend a much higher ratio of their nation’s income on ICT.

The latest update to the Index, the Tau Omega Index, adapts the original Index to instead look at spending specifically in cloud computing by incorporating broadband speeds and connectivity into the equation.

The results of who is investing the most aggressively in the cloud, accounting for income disparity, are as follows:

1. South Korea
2. Bulgaria
3. Ukraine
4. Lithuania
5. Romania
6. Hungary
7. Vietnam
8. Estonia
9. Czech Republic
10. Sweden
11. Hong Kong
12. Poland
13. Latvia
14. Bangladesh
15. Slovak Republic
16. Malaysia
17. UK
18. Singapore
19. Netherlands
20. Morocco
21. Egypt
22. Canada
23. Russia
24. China
25. Slovenia

Again, the study highlights how Eastern Europe and the Far East are far more active in the cloud market than the leading economic nations.

However, the challenges remains to compare like with like. A fair, relative scale for comparing the likes of Hungary with the US, in terms of spend, is not easy.

“My index is integrated to favour countries with lower incomes,” said Strukhoff. “Wealthier countries tend to score lower than developing nations. The Index's results can't be plotted along a straight line. ICT buying follows a curve, where even the most aggressive developed nation will spend less - as measured by this index - than aggressive developing countries.”

The list of the top 25 spending countries according to the Tau Index is:

1. Bangladesh
2. Ukraine
3. Morocco
4. Egypt
5. Hungary
6. Malaysia
7. Bulgaria
8. Senegal
9. Czech Republic
10. Vietnam
11. South Korea
12. Pakistan
13. Romania
14. Saudi Arabia
15. Poland
16. Thailand
17. India
18. Honduras
19. Slovakia
20. South Africa
21. Kenya
22. Philippines
23. Tunisia
24. Iran
25. Russia

A full report with results from 80+ countries and country rankings within specific categories of the Index will be made available January 2012.