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Category: Economics

Published August 18, 2011

Is Africa Leapfrogging PCs Like It Did Land Lines?

Forget pie-in-the-sky projects like One Laptop Per Child. That is essentially the message of this Forbes post by Tim Worstall:

“It can be true that a developing country should just skip an entire level or stage of economic development. For example, it’s now pretty certain that no African country is ever going to have a land line telephone network as do the industrialised countries. Building a mobile network is so much cheaper than sending wire to every house that that land line network is simply never going to be built.

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Published August 17, 2011

A Cheap Way to Measure Welfare in Developing Countries?

From a post by David Aronson on the Congo Resources blog:

“One thought occurred to me: Cell phone minutes. Cell phones are pretty ubiquitous, at least in town. Most people don’t have monthly plans. Instead, they buy cell phone minutes in increments of one to five dollars at a time. When people aren’t doing so well, they purchase fewer of those minutes. When they’re flush, they purchase more. As a proxy for economic trends, then, minutes have several advantages. They aren’t a requirement of life, like rent or food. But neither are they a lagging indicator, the result of pre-existing contracts and commitments, in the way that labor costs might be. Instead, they reflect how well people feel they are doing at the very moment the minutes are purchased. They are, to use an economic term I probably have no business using, highly elastic.”

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