International Readiness
Status of Governments and Industries Worldwide
During Q4 (fourth quarter) 1998, compliance progress acceleratedto levels higher than any previous quarter in industrialized countriesworldwide and in most industry segments. Unfortunately, less developedcountries made little progress. The compliance status gap betweencompanies and countries farthest ahead and companies and countriesfarthest behind has widened even more.Some less developed countries have been very slow to addressthe problem. Many of them are less dependent upon automation,and poor reliability in key infrastructure systems is commonlyexperienced. Areas of risk are: 1) lagging industries that industrializedcountries have high dependencies on; 2) countries that spend higherpercentages of the GDP (gross domestic product) on technologyand are lagging…
