Technology upgrading: Toward better firms

face in generating more firms, including both DT-supplying and DT-adopting firms. Third, it discusses the key policies to address the main obstacles associated with technology adoption and start-up entrepreneurship and proposes how DT solutions could be used to facilitate this process.

TECHNOLOGY UPGRADING: TOWARD BETTER FIRMS

The findings presented in this section are based on the new firm-level Adoption of Technology (fAT) survey in Senegal, as well as on a survey of DT adoption by micro enterprises based on Research IcT Africa data.10 The fAT survey— developed by cirera, comin, and cruz (2020)—is a new tool to measure technology adoption at the firm level. The fAT data provide new measures of firm-level adoption along three dimensions: (a) standard measures of technologies; (b) technologies applied to general business support functions; and (c) sector-specific technologies. The standard, firm-level measures of technologies refer to “traditional” measures of general purpose technology (GPT) adoption, which enable firms to apply more technologies toward specific tasks. They include access and usage of GPTs such as electricity, phone, computers, internet, and social networks. Technologies applied to general business support functions are those technologies used by any firm, irrespective of the industries they are in, such as technologies used for business administration, production planning, sales, and payments methods. The sector-specific technologies are those applied to business functions that are industry specific, for example, land preparation in agricultural industries or input testing in the food processing industry. A detailed description of these technology measures— comparing data from Senegal, vietnam, and the State of ceará in Brazil—is provided by cirera et al. (2020).

Standard measures of DTs: Use of information and communication technology

Except for basic mobile phones for business purposes, standard measures of DT adoption that focus on the use of information and communication technology (IcT) suggest that firms in Senegal are lagging. Although there is a clear correlation between the size of firms and access to landline phones, about 90 percent of firms use some type of mobile phone for business purposes (table 3.2). This finding is consistent with previous findings on the diffusion of fixed-line telephones compared with mobile phones in several countries in Africa. However, the same pattern is not observed with other digital enablers such as the number of computers, smartphones, and tablets. with regard to the quality of fixed internet access, most firms that use it rely on DSl (20 percent of all firms, or 63 percent of the 34 percent of firms that use the internet). About 12 percent of firms using fixed internet still rely on the much slower dial-up services. This number is larger for informal and small firms. The adoption of computers and smartphones or tablets for business purposes varies in expected ways across firm sizes. larger firms have a significantly larger number of devices available, which is consistent with their scale. on average, small firms have less than 1 computer per firm (0.8), while there are about 2.7 computers per firm across all firms, and large firms have about 31 computers, either desktop or laptop, per firm.