Software publishers lose more money to piracy in the Asia-Pacific region than anywhere else due to soaring computer ownership in Asian powerhouses China and India, a study showed on Thursday.

Pirated software installations totalled nearly USD 59 billion globally last year, with the Asia-Pacific share standing at USD 18.7 billion, the highest level since the first study in 2003, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) said.

China was Asia-Pacific's primary piracy culprit and the world's second-largest behind the US, installing USD 7.78 billion of stolen programs last year.

Indian software pirates installed USD 2.74 billion worth of unlicensed programs, putting it in fourth place in the global rankings behind Russia, whose illegal software use amounted to USD 2.84 billion.

Added together, the two Asian economic giants constituted 56.1 per cent of the total value of unlicensed software installed in the Asia-Pacific area, the BSA said.

"Emerging economies like China and India have increased their share of the global PC (personal computer) market," said Victor Lim, a regional vice president at industry research firm IDC, which carried out the BSA study.

Statistics published by IDC showed China's total PC shipments from October to December last year rose 4.2 per cent year-on-year to 15.7 million.

Indian PC sales jumped 30 per cent in the whole of 2010.

The spurt in demand for PCs in the two countries "resulted in an increase in the commercial value of unlicensed software," Lim told AFP.

The BSA's senior director of marketing for the region Roland Chan said it made economic sense for countries to stamp out piracy.

"If there was a 10 percentage point drop in software piracy rates in these countries over a space of four years... as far as the Asia Pacific region goes, that would generate an additional USD 41 billion" in GDP, Chan said.

"It would create 350,000 additional jobs in the IT sector, and for governments it would generate close to about 9 billion (in taxes)."