4.1 E-Commerce
E-Commerce (Electronic Commerce) is a brand-new business mode that is based on the Internet, and takes the two parties of transaction as main bodies, and bank electronic payment and accounting as means and relies on the customer data. Concept of e-Commerce in narrow sense means to realize the whole course of commodity and service transaction and transaction management activities without papers by the use of modern IT methods and using the Internet and computer unit to replace the paper media information carrier of the traditional transaction course in activities such as storage, transmission, statistics and publishing, etc.; concept of e-Commerce in broad sense means to realize the whole business activities in electronic transaction through the use of whole IT technology. There are not only transaction on the Internet, but also supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM) and operation control system (OPS), etc. included.
1. E-Commerce grows rapidly in the whole world
Since the emergence of e-Commerce, it grows rapidly in the whole world with sales amount doubled. World e-Commerce sales amount only reached US$1.2 billion in 1994, but hit US$300 billion in 2000. Meanwhile, e-Commerce transaction amount of different countries in the world also increases in a quite rapid speed. On-line retail rates in North American region triple in the speed every year. Though e-Commerce in Europe started 18 months late than that in America, it is developed quite fast. According to the report made by the Forrester Research, from year 2000 to 2004, total e-Commerce trade volume in European countries will increment 100% every year, and its total trade volume will hit the level of Euro 1600 billion in the following 4 years, accounting for 6% of total trade volume in Europe. For Japan, Singapore and South Korea with developed information industry in the Asia-Pacific region, their e-Commerce is also developing very rapidly. According to the E-Commerce Japanese and American Market Scale Investigation published by Japan in March 1999: Japanese B2B scale is about the half of American scale, and will expand over 8 times by year 2003 by estimation, B2B e-Commerce ratio (ratio of e-Commerce in Final demand plus intermediate demand) will reach 11.2%.
2. Unbalanced development of e-Commerce in the world
At present, Development of e-Commerce in the world is unbalanced. Application field and scale of e-Commerce in America is far leading to that in other countries. Among the whole world e-Commerce transaction, over 50% is occurred in America. The international e-Commerce development situation has been the pattern of the USA on the top and European and Asian developed countries as the next following in the world. Due to different application extent of IT and the different level of informatization in different countries, e-Commerce development will still be unbalanced in future. By year 2004, the world e-Commerce will reach 8.6% of the world total trade volume, while e-Commerce in America, Australia and Chinese Taiwan, China will amount to over 10% of total volume of their own countries, and these countries will be the leading ones of e-Commerce. It is shown in the Table.

3. B2B becoming the direction of e-Commerce development in different countries
In several transaction mode of e-Commerce, B2C and B2B account for more proportion, and B2B is the most. As viewed from practice and tide wave of the development of international e-Commerce development, B2B transaction could be considered as the biggest e-Commerce transaction volume, which has reached US$ 6 trillion dollars up to now, while B2C transaction volume has only over US$400 billion. In addition, according to the statistics of Department of Commerce USA, in 1998, the USA e-Commerce is dominated by B2C with its transaction volume accounting for 70% of e-Commerce. But ion 1999, it went on the contrary, 70% of e-Commerce transaction volume was B2B. Annual composite growth rate of B2B e-Commerce is 79.98%. B2B trade volume of U.S. e-Commerce will reach 842 billion dollars by 2003. In China, nearly 99.5% of e-Commerce transaction amount was B2B in 2000, while B2C only accounted for 0.5%. It is estimated that B2B transaction volume will be dominant position while the trade volume of B2C only accounted for about 1/15 from 1997 to 2003. Though lots of organs have different opinions over the proportion of B2B in the whole e-Commerce, all think it exceeds 50%, as shown in the Table.

4. Different application extent of e-Commerce in different Industries
E-Commerce not only penetrates to different industries in different sequence, but also the proceeds from different industries are different. According to the research of Jupiter Company: Computer and communication equipment production enterprises are especially suitable to the application of E-Commerce. In the future 5 years, five industries which are computer/communication, food service and beverage, automobile and attachments, equipment and raw material in the manufacturing industry, and building and real estate will be the priority industries to apply E-Commerce in the future, as shown in the Table

4.2 Enterprise Informatization
Since the 1990s, IT represented by the computer technology has got increasingly comprehensive and in-depth application in the enterprises for their business, management, design and manufacture, while having promoted the transformation of the enterprises in the developed countries rapidly from the production process automatization to the enterprise informatization, and playing a great driving role to raise the kernelcompetitiveness of enterprises.
1. Enterprise informatization in the USA The USA
renovated its traditional industry through IT, and turned the slump trend of traditional industry in the 1990s. Its Labor productivity has been keeping an annual average development rate of 2.5% since 1990, over twice times that of 1970-1990 period. Information industry has become the important factor contributing to economy growth of the USA. See the Table.

Viewing from enterprise information, the informatization achievements of the USA enterprises are mainly the following aspects:
Firstly, improvement of the production process and flow by electronic IT. The USA put forward the computer integrated manufacturing system (CIMS) in the 1970s for the first time, and US Department of Commerce set up the CIMS Technical Propagation Center in the early 1980s. In 1985, companies in the leading position of CIMS were McDonnel-Douglas Aircraft Co., General Motors Corp., Westinghouse Corp., and Ingersoll Corp. Machine Tool Industry increased the production efficiency greatly through equipment updating and the application of the computer to control machine tool. In 1990, production value of digital controlled machine tools amounted for 43% that of the total machine tools. In the early 1990s, the USA government listed CIMS as one of 22 key technologies effecting fate and position of the national economy and one of the 6 key technologies to improve the international competitiveness of manufacturing industry. After putting forward the concept of parallel engineering, precise production, lightness manufacturing and product database management in the 1990s, computer integrated manufacturing system is becoming perfect and expanded increasingly. Till 1997, the USA enterprises implementing the computer integrated manufacturing system reached 100,000.
Secondly, application of electronic IT in management. Development of IT creates conditions for the information acquisition, storage, treatment and transmission in the production of enterprises, which enable the informatization of enterprise management, to become possible and keep continuously improvement and perfection in the later course. Material Requirement Planning (MRP) emerged in the 1960s, developed into Close MRP with the integration of accounting management in 1970s, and into MRP-II with the integration of production planning management in 1980s. The application of enterprise management informatization system in the USA had become quite popular by the 1980s. For instance, General Motors Corp setup management information system, which connect 65 sales department distributed in 49 sates, 18 product warehouses in 11 states and 40 manufacturing departments in 21 states all together by the use of network. And by means of computer network, it could have factories spreading over the whole country and reduce the costs of management, warehousing, transportation and distribution. In the 1990s, it developed Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP), which made it enter into the finance, commerce and education trade. After the 1990s, most of big corporations in the USA, such as Cisco and GE implemented ERP system and raise the enterprise's competitiveness.
Thirdly, development of enterprise e-Commerce based on the Internet. Emergence of Internet and development of e-Commerce allow the enterprise informatization enter into a new development stage. Logistic, information and fund flows between enterprises got unified, which enabled the internal resources of the enterprise make a timely reaction to the market, while having realized the integration of information inside the enterprise and informatization of the whole society, and greatly raised the enterprise's competitiveness. Starting from year 2000, the development of Internet began entering the global expansion period. Along with the development of the Internet, ERP system extended additionally the supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM), realizing the revolution on production and commodity circulation. At present, SCM and CRM systems get quite extensive application in the USA. The US enterprises have applied the network to a quite high level. They integrate production, management and business together, collect and combine all information from raw material purchase to product sales in the network, while further establishing the leading position of informatization of US enterprises in the world. In the term of e-Commerce, by the end of 1998, 60% of small enterprises, 80% of medium-sized enterprises and over 90% of large-scale enterprises had carried out comprehensively the e-Commerce activities with the help of the Internet and up to year 2000, all large enterprises in USA have realized informatization.
2. Informatization of British enterprises
As a main developed country in the West, the United Kingdom clearly realizes that in the information times IT is the key factor to decide whether the economy is successful or not. In the meantime, with the gradual decrease of the competitiveness of British traditional industries, the continuously increased labor cost, and the intensively increased pressure of globalization to enterprises' production, the British government realizes that social informatization has become the inevitable trend, and the enterprise informatization is an important means to propel the development of economy at the network economic times.
With the efforts of government and enterprise, British enterprise informatization has improved quite rapidly, in the production process, enterprises management informatization, especially in Internet-based E-Commerce, it has taken the lead among European countries. 70% of enterprises have implemented E-Commerce to different level. In 1999, B to C-type e-Commerce reached 1.2 billion, B to B-type reached pound 800 million. Now Britain has become the largest e-Commerce market in Europe.

4.3 E-Government
The key content of e-Government is to establish a virtual government, that is: a round-clock government service system spanning time, place and departments. E-Government can not only save the government expense and improve the government working efficiency, but also increase transparency of the government decision and promote the development of e-Commerce and environment informatization.
Along with the IT development, content of e-Government is expanding continuously. In the 1970s and 1980s, e-Government mainly means the office automation (OA), that is, to deal with the internal business of office by the use of computer technology, such as drawing, transmitting and conservation of files and documents. At the late 1980s, content of e-Government mainly was management information system that meant the information processing and treatment system setup to meet the requirement of the administrative supervisor, with a key to support the decision and meet the requirement of the administrative supervisor for the timely, accurate and relevant information. After the 1990s, with the development of international Internet technology and its application to government administration, electronic government became the main content of e-Government, and mainly meant the setup of networking government information system by the use of modern computer and communication technology on the basis of government internal electronic automation, and provide the government information and other public services for enterprises, social organizations and citizens in more convenient time, place and method through the different information service facilities. Countries with relative better e-Government are the USA, UK, Japan and France.
Because government is in a dominant position in the course of pushing the country informatization, and government administration is heavily dependent on the information, government informatization is in a key and core position in national economy and social informatization. In order to meet the challenge of information society, many countries and regional governments on the one hand actively develop national information infrastructure; on the other hand they commit to the e-Government, reform government by the use of IT and constitute electronic government
The US government level takes the lead over other countries. Its government website construction is quite perfect and mature. American federal government authorities all have websites, and governments at state level all have their websites too, and almost all countries and cities have setup their own websites. The White House website is just the most representative example, which is actually the center of all US government websites and links all official websites of the US government which have accessed to the Internet. According to the statistics, as a result of e-Government, from 1992 to 1996 the US government reduced its staffs by 240,000 people, closed nearly 2000 offices, and saved the expenditure of US$ 11.8 billion. As for providing services to residents and enterprises, 200 bureaus of the US government defined 3000 items of service standard, abolished outdated administrative regulation about 16000 pages and simplified 31000 regulations. In the USA, network setup of national employer taxation administration system, Federal Government National Purchasing System and account transferring system not only save the large amount of property and materials, but also improve transparency of government affairs, and block the channel of jobbery.
British e-Government construction have got quite good improvement, too. I stands in the world top. According to the investigation made by BRINT Research Company of the American Business Research Institute on the 250 government departments in the US, UK, Canada, Austria and New Zealand, etc., it is found that in UK 60% of government departments has opened or on the way of constructing websites, while in other countries, the highest of that rate is 53%. It is estimated by that company that by year 2002, 41% of British citizens will enjoy the government service mainly through the websites of government authorities.
The Central Government of Japan basically set up the administration information system and decision supporting system for the main business activities. Central government spends around US$ 8 billion to 10 billion for annual IT expenditure.
France once went against the Internet for the purpose of culture protection. But since 1998, France has gradually accepted the Internet. At present, there are almost 60 websites of government department's on the Internet in France including education, telecomm environment. In addition, the French government also set up an index website for different department websites. You can search the function of government authorities according to name and responsibility, etx by the use of this website.