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21 February 2012 | Posted by Innova Institute

Is IT adoption related to wealth?

This is a special post within the learning activities of the course on “Transfer of new technology in the economy”. Although this post is addressed to the course students, please feel free to participate in the debate if you feel that your contribution can help their learning process.

Innova Institute has been involved in research projects around the Information Society. In particular, one of the recent analyses of the Institute was based on a cross cultural study on the adoption of different technologies. 

While comparing the different sets of data among the different countries; we found out that some countries with a low GPD have a higher level of IT adoption on the mobile cellular subscriptions compared to countries with high GPD (such as the United States).

Please, look at the following table that includes data on mobile cellular subscriptions for 2002 and 2007; and the GPD per capita for five selected countries.

Data source: ITU (http://www.itu.int) and Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org)

From the Innova Institute we propose you to have a look at the table and discuss about the apparent paradox based on the fact that some countries like Gabon (GPD: 16,021) have higher mobile penetration than the US (GPD: 48,147)

Please, post your comments on this situation.

For further information on the data: http://www.itu.int/pub/D-IND-ICTOI-2009/es (Document: "Corrigendum 1"; Annex 4: Statistical tables of indicators used to compute the IDI)

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Comments

This really surprised me! I would have thought there would be a closer connection between wealth and IT adoption. It reminds me a totally different topic that also shocked me last year. One would think Maternity leaves are longer in wealthy countries than in poor ones. This is how it works in most cases, but not always. Some rich countries, like Australia or the USA, have rather poor maternity policies, while a few African poor ones have maternity leave laws very similar to European countries'. Asian countries are the worst ones even if they have a higher average income.

It had been proven for some years now that consumers in countries with growing middle class are more and more demanding for access to information and communication. Defying classic economic models, the demand for communication (mobile cellular in this case) leads traditional media growth, signifying a global, disruptive phenomenon. This is the case of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) with exponential middle class growth, but also some N-11 (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey and Vietnam) economies, and most developping african countries picking up on the 3g Mobile technology. The demand for information via the Internet, on the other hand, follows slower, more predictable growth patterns. Most of marketers in Africa especially had identified this and the immediate implicationsin my opinion is the uprising viral marketing and mobile advertising in the high-growth emerging economies.

Yes Adote, this is true. Mobile cellular communication has been a disruptive technology in today's communication settings. Also, mobile networks have appeared as a cheaper communication network to diffuse communication services and most countries with a limited fixed telephony network have been able to improve their communication infraestructure with a lower investment.
Do you think that these countries have experienced a "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging" rel="nofollow">leapfrogging</a>" effect?

Thanks a lot for your comments Ana.

Yes they definitely did, since most of the users did not have to adopt all generations of the mobile technology. An exemple would be someone using his first generation Nokia phone for years, but not having to catch up with the late generation smartphone to effectively meet his business needs or simply exchange with peers in real-time. Even in terms of infrastructure capacity, most countries went from the limited fixed telephony stage to the 3G one.

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