Information Technology Meets the Developing World

That information and communications technologies are reshaping developed economies is now very much taken for granted. Much less is known about how such technologies are affecting or will affect the developing world. The only certainty is the obvious fact that telephone and Internet use in these countries lags significantly behind their richer counterparts. For most economists, this “digital divide” can be easily explained. Poorer countries cannot afford the required infrastructure. But as they get richer, these countries will see these new technologies diffuse throughout their societies in much the same way that electricity did in the past. In The Information Revolution and Developing Countries, however, Ernest Wilson suggests that the reality is more complicated than that. Even though both the deployment of information and communications technologies and Internet use are positively correlated with Gross Domestic Product per capita across countries, economics alone cannot explain the diffusion of such technologies

Business · Certainty · Developing country · Development economics · Digital divide · Economic growth · Economics · Emerging markets · Emerging technologies · Gross domestic product · Information and Communications Technology · Information technology · Macroeconomics · Per capita · Political science · Sociology · Software deployment · Telecommunications · The Internet · Computer Science · ICT Impact and Policies · Law