Bangladesh has been ranked 55 th among 61 countries surveyed by the WorldWideWeb Foundation on internet's political, social and economic impacts on people.

Bangladesh is the last among the countries in the Asia Pacific region, according to the Swiss-based foundation that released the first such index with promise to repeat the exercise once in every year.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of World Wide Web, established the foundation in 2009. He invented Worldwide Web in 1989 while working as a software engineer at CERN, the large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

Sweden topped the chart, followed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Finland, Switzerland and New Zealand while Yemen is on the bottom, preceded by Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Benin, Ethiopia, Namibia and Bangladesh.

Of other Asian countries, Singapore ranked 11, China, 29, India, 33, Indonesia, 34, Thailand, 37, Pakistan, 44, and Nepal, 52.

Among the seven compo-nents used to weigh internet's impact, communications and institutional infrastructure indicate web connectivity and the laws, regulation and censorship indicate web access.

Low-ranking countries like Bangladesh suffer a vicious cycle of poor infrastructure and high costs for access to internet, the index suggests.

Globally, positive findings include the spread of e-governance: government data and services made available to citizens online, as well as initiatives to encourage online participation in decision-making, notes the index.