By Rachel Chan

SINGAPORE has the ninth-most competitive IT industry in the world - and third in Asia.

This is according to an Economist Intelligence Study (EIS) sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

BSA is a non-profit trade association created to advance the goals of the software industry and its hardware partners. Its headquarters is in Washington.

Singapore had improved on its 11th placing in last year's inaugural study, but still fell behind Asian countries Taiwan and South Korea, which came in second and eighth.

In first place is the United States, which also topped the chart last year.

While Singapore has done well in areas like the development of human capital and support for IT-industry development - scoring second and third respectively in these areas - the study reveals that there is still room for improvement.

Singapore came in 12th and 15th for the legal environment and research-and-development indexes. These are indicators of a country's efforts in protecting and enforcing intellectual-property rights (IPR), and the number of new domestic patents in IT.

According to the study, investment in local research and development is essential to developing IT sectors that are sustainable in the long run. An adequate legal environment - with comprehensive and transparent IPR legislation - is also required to boost investment from foreign firms and encourage start-ups.

The EIS assesses and compares the IT-industry environments of 66 economies to determine the extent to which they enable IT-sector competitiveness.

Researchers used a benchmarking model to determine the IT-industry competitiveness index and conducted in-depth interviews with a total of 15 senior executives of IT firms and "independent experts knowledgeable about the drivers of IT competitiveness" before procuring results.

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