The so-called "digital divide" - the gap between countries with adequate access to modern information technology and those without - seems to be widening.

It used to be the case that half the world's population had never made a telephone call. Now, as the global population expands, the total seems to be closer to two-thirds. The divide and its implications is attracting concern at the highest levels. It is clearly in nobody's interest that a two-tier information technology world should be allowed to exist.

Poor countries will be further marginalised and their opportunities reduced, while development opportunities will be missed.

Last year, following the Okinawa summit, the G8 nations agreed to establish a task force, the Digital Opportunities or DOT Force, to investigate the issue. Now the United Nations has decided to set up, under the chairmanship of the director general, a new task force with some 37 members from 18 countries selected from both developed and developing countries. The two task forces will have several members in common to facilitate coordination.

In a significant development for international co-operation, the plan has the support of the Chinese. Earlier this month, Mr Lu Xinkui, vice-minister of the Chinese ministry of the information industries said the formation of such a high-level group was essential if the "digital welfare" enjoyed by developing countries was to spread to less developed nations.

He said that if the divide was allowed to widen further, it would damage the hopes of countries who saw information technology as a way of improving their living standards.

Mr Lu was addressing the Global Information Infrastructure Commission, an independent assembly of industrialists, academics and politicians, which aims to be a catalyst for change in the use of information technology for social advance.

The GIIC's own recommendations for tackling the divide at the conclusion of its deliberations were sensible in ambition, if modest in scope. It concluded that it would be a mistake to assume that global solutions were possible, going on to suggest that new public and private partnerships would be necessary to tackle the divide at the regional and local level. A willingness on the part of governments to become involved and put their muscle behind the necessary changes was critically important, it agreed.

The digital divide, however, is a problem with many dimensions. It can be seen as a disjunction between the rich north and the poor south. It can be seen as a difference between sophisticated, wired urban areas and under-resourced rural regions. But it can also be seen, in every country, as the gap between early adopters, late adopters and never adopters.

A straw poll carried out by the GIIC among its members and associates - that is, a digitally-aware population - discovered that business and political leaders in the developed world believe the gap is narrowing, while the reverse is true among developing countries, with Africa particularly pessimistic.

The chief barrier to a solution to the digital divide is the endemic nature of the problem. By analogy, there are no easy answers to the problem of poverty, or medical disasters such as AIDS.

Simple, obvious, recommendations such as improvements in education at all levels in developing countries have proved difficult to fulfil because of a lack of skilled personnel, funds and political will.

On the other hand, dramatic improvements are possible. To have a phone line installed in Sao Paulo, Brazil used to cost some $5,000 on the black market. They were so scarce and so expensive that companies used to list their lines as assets. Today, after privatisation and liberalisation of the market, lines are installed for $35 in under two weeks.

If the e-economy is to represent a new opportunity for developing countries, it is vital that a level playing field is established. By its very nature, that is going to be difficult, probably impossible, to achieve.

And it is asking a lot of the poorer nations to embrace information technology wholeheartedly when many companies in the developed economies are only dipping their toes in the water of e-commerce and finding it too cold for comfort.

But that is no excuse for not making a start. Mr Naoshi Shima, vice president of NEC of Japan, argued at the GIIC meeting that to bridge the digital divide it is necessary to start with the simplest applications: information, e-mail, games, perhaps.

A great deal can be done with the simplest infrastructure - a basic phone service (whether wireline or wireless), and internet access is probably enough. To establish even that will require huge efforts in sub-Saharan Africa. The social and economic benefits, however, will be out of all proportion to the political and financial costs.