New developments in electronic business-to-business transactions

High expectations have been placed on Internet use and particularly on electronic business transactions between enterprises - B2B e-business, or simply B2B. They are expected to improve the competitiveness of enterprises through sinking costs, faster information and enhanced flexibility. B2B is not only the application of technologies but also a motor of change for economic processes and industry structures: B2B-applications have an enormous potential for the alteration of economic processes in the direction of the knowledge society. Within the framework of the programme eEuropa, which the governments of the EU-15 member states approved in March 2000, B2B occupies an essential role. As the first in a series of contributions, this article deals with the problems of estimating the spread of electronic business transactions between enterprises and presents the approach of B2B Metrics study made by the Ifo Institute together with four international partner institutes for the General Directorate of the Information Society of the European Community. The results of these studies will be published in subsequent issues of ifo Schnelldienst.