Title: Mobile marvels: A special report on telecoms in emerging markets
Source: The Economist
Publisher: The Economist Newspaper Limited
Date (published): 24/09/2009
Date (accessed): 05/10/2009
Type of information: special report
Language: English
On-line access: yes (HTML)
Abstract:
Poor countries have already benefited hugely from mobile phones. Now get ready for a second round,... In places with bad roads, unreliable postal services, few trains and parlous landlines, mobile phones can substitute for travel, allow quicker and easier access to information on prices, enable traders to reach wider markets, boost entrepreneurship and generally make it easier to do business. A study by the World Resources Institute found that as developing-world incomes rise, household spending on mobile phones grows faster than spending on energy, water or indeed anything else.

The reason why mobile phones are so valuable to people in the poor world is that they are providing access to telecommunications for the very first time, rather than just being portable adjuncts to existing fixed-line phones, as in the rich world. “For you it was incremental—here it’s revolutionary,” says Isaac Nsereko of MTN, Africa’s biggest operator. According to a recent study, adding an extra ten mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts growth in GDP per person by 0.8 percentage points.