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)