THE VALUATION OF THE POLISH DEVELOPMENT LEVEL IN COMPARISON WITH OTHER SELECTED COUNTRIES Michal Golinski Warsaw School of Economics Poland Abstract This paper proposes a measure of a society's information infrastructure. This measure is defined by an overall index of the saturation of a society's multimedia technology. The index is used for the appraisal of the information infrastructure in Poland and in other countries. Poland's development deficits in the area of information infrastructure will be defined. The main causes of the current state of affairs in Poland will also be investigated. Further, some actions to improve the country's situation will be proposed. Conclusions concerning Poland may have a more general character. The research therefore suggests that most of these conclusions can be applied to other Central-Eastern European countries. 1. INTRODUCTION The importance of information as the fourth factor of production and as one of the most important indicators of modem civilisation is well known and well described. Access to and ease of use of the information is determined by the level of development of the society's information infrastructure, which is defined by the saturation of the given society with multimedia technology. Numerous rankings and international comparisons can be found each day, beginning with the simplest (e.g. productiveness of 1 ha of grain) through quite complex (e.g. 'The World Competitiveness Report' published yearly by IMD Geneva). However, there are no simple tools allowing us to make comparisons concerning the information infrastructure. The paper reports on research designed to resolve the above problem. The paper proposes and illustrate the use of this index of the information infrastructure development level (IIDL). L. B. Rasmussen et al. (eds.), Computers and Networks in the Age of Globalization © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2001