China leads in absolute numbers, according to the International Telecommunications Union (pdf), but South Korea has the greatest percentage of wired young people – 99.6 have been online for at least five years. Still, two-thirds of the world’s youth didn’t grow up with the Internet:
As you might expect, impoverished and war-torn nations have the lowest proportion of digital natives, a fact that could make the global economic playing field even less even going forward. Digital natives make up less than 5 percent of the youth in Afghanistan, Nepal, Iraq, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and many other countries across south Asia, central Africa, and parts of the Middle East. “This is fundamental to a country’s economic and social development and their participation in an information network society,” [researcher Michael] Best said. “In these conflict-stressed and developing countries, the report suggests that further attention to Internet infrastructure and capacity are critical to their economic development.”
