Truck and Barter

Ukraine and fiscal space for growth

A recent World Bank report on Ukraine- Creating Fiscal Space for Growth: A Public Finance Review;

“Recent economic and fiscal trends in Ukraine, combined with the financing requirements of the reform agenda, have brought fiscal pressures to the fore. Ukraine’s economy grew by more than 50 percent between 1999 and 2004, but growth decelerated from 12.1 percent in 2004 to 2.6 percent in 2005. Contributing to this slowdown were less favorable terms of trade dynamics (in particular for metal prices)1 and a substantial deceleration in investment demand (partly as a result of uncertainty about government policies and cutbacks in public investment). Despite the recovery of the economy in the first semester of 2006 (5 percent growth y/y), the short term outlook is still threatened by potential further increases in energy prices in 2007. At the same time, increasing public spending threatens to crowd out the private sector. Driven by hikes in pensions and public sector wages, public spending soared from 39.4 to 44 percent of GDP in 2005, placing significant pressure on public finances. This high public spending and its consumption orientation risks generating inflationary impulses and higher interest rates, and eroding household wealth. Ukraine also has a high tax burden which discourages the private sector.”

Related;

The Ukrainian Economy

Ukraine's politics-The birth-pangs of democracy, or an unseemly power struggle?

Back to Basics -- Fiscal Space: What It Is and How to Get It;
“What is fiscal space? It can be defined as room in a government´s budget that allows it to provide resources for a desired purpose without jeopardizing the sustainability of its financial position or the stability of the economy. The idea is that fiscal space must exist or be created if extra resources are to be made available for worthwhile government spending. A government can create fiscal space by raising taxes, securing outside grants, cutting lower priority expenditure, borrowing resources (from citizens or foreign lenders), or borrowing from the banking system (and thereby expanding the money supply). But it must do this without compromising macroeconomic stability and fiscal sustainability—making sure that it has the capacity in the short term and the longer term to finance its desired expenditure programs as well as to service its debt.”

Ukraine-Doing Business

Podcast of the Day- Doing Business 2007

Book forum from Cato is now online How Nations Prosper: Economic Freedom and Doing Business in 2007;

“Nations that are more economically free outperform less free nations in growth and levels of prosperity. James Gwartney, coauthor of the annual Economic Freedom of the World report, will review current trends and the latest research on the impact of regulations, the rule of law, and other aspects of economic freedom on the whole range of development indicators. Simeon Djankov will show how excessive bureaucratic procedures and government fees make it prohibitively expensive for the world’s poor to join the formal economy. Reform can make it easier for entrepreneurs and businesses to create wealth. Djankov will show which countries are making progress, how they are successfully reforming, and the potentially large growth opportunities they can expect.” Listen to the podcast.

Related;
Simeon Djankov and the Doing Business Database
Discussing Doing Business
The Road Less Traveled of Business Regulatory Reform

Free the World

Related;
Read My Lips

Pocket Guide to Asian Think Tanks

From Asian Development Bank Institute;

“This is a handy guide to the leading Asia-Pacific think tanks working on development and economics. Each entry
- provides web links to the think tank and its research staff,
- describes the current research program,
- lists if visiting researcher or internship programs are offered, and
- states whether online publications are freely available."

Related; Think Tanks and Policy Advice in Countries in Transition

How to Make Money – from War

The Guardian reports;

“Armor Group International, the security firm that makes most of its profits in Iraq, reported a drop in earnings for the first half of the year because of increased competition for business and the loss of a major training contract in Iraq.

The London-based company reported a 30% rise in sales to $134.4m in the six months to June 30. Armor generated more than half of its revenues from business in Iraq - $70.3m - although its non-Iraq business grew by 57%.

However, pre-tax profits slipped to $3.7m from $4.7m for the same period a year ago. Analysts had expected profits to be only 10% lower than last year's.

Armor is chaired by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former Conservative foreign and defence secretary. It is one of the UK's leading providers of private security for reconstruction workers in Iraq.

"The group has achieved strong revenue growth over the first half, and we are encouraged by the significant growth outside Iraq," said Dave Seaton, the chief excecutive officer.

The main hit to sales was from the loss of a $7.8m contract with the United States for training staff at the ministry of justice in Iraq, the company told Reuters. "It was a one-off programme funded by the US," Mr Seaton said. "The Iraqi government does not have the funding for its own training needs."

Armor is diversifying and has new or extended contracts providing security at the World Bank headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan; clearing land mines in southern Sudan, and doing security work for oil and gas companies.”

I wouldn't be worried so much as Failed States in the world seems to be increasing according to this World Bank report.

Related;

World Bank Lists Failing Nations That Can Breed Global Terrorism;

“The number of weak and poorly governed nations that can provide a breeding ground for global terrorism has grown sharply over the past three years, despite increased Western efforts to improve conditions in such states, according to a new World Bank report.

"Fragile" countries, whose deepening poverty puts them at risk from terrorism, armed conflict and epidemic disease, have jumped to 26 from 17 since the report was last issued in 2003. Five states graduated off the list, but 14 made new appearances, including Nigeria and seven other African countries, Kosovo, Cambodia, East Timor, and the West Bank and Gaza. Twelve states, including Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan, made both lists.”

The Adolescent Brain and Social Policies

“A decade ago, the prevailing notion was that brain growth ended at about the age of 2 years. Since then, we have learned that brain growth continues well into adolescence (between ages 10 and 19) and into young adulthood (see the figure below). During this period the brain undergoes a series of changes, and parts of the brain associated with social skills, problem solving, and identifying emotions mature only by the early twenties. However, this process of brain development cannot entirely explain adolescent decision making and behavior. Nor does it override the effect of the environment—parents, schools, communities—in which young people live.

Brain development: arborization and pruning
The brain is made up of nerve cells—about 10 billion of them—connected by branches or dendrites. These branches move information from one cell to another, but these connections are not soldered together; rather, there are spaces between the branch of one cell and the body of another. These spaces are called synapses, and information moves from cell to cell across these spaces by releasing tiny packets of chemicals. When there are abnormalities in the chemicals in the synapses, a variety of clinical conditions result, such as depression and attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorders.

Different parts of the brain handle different activities—that much is well-known. What is new is the finding that during adolescence certain areas of the brain grow in size and other regions become more efficient. For example, the area of the brain responsible for language more than doubles in size between ages 8 and 14. Consequently, language acquisition is optimal at those ages. So, too, connections grow and strengthen between the brain stem and the spinal cord, increasing the connections between the emotions and what the body feels. Throughout childhood and adolescence, more and more nerve cells grow sheaths around them called white matter or myelin. This is like building a superhighway, allowing information to be interpreted and recalled much faster than was ever possible as a young child.

These structural changes are only some of the brain’s alterations during adolescence. Another major change is called “pruning.” Throughout early childhood, the number of connections between cells increase, and because the process is much like the growth of branches on a tree, it is called arborization. It allows a child’s brain to be very excitable—which is why children seem to be perpetual motion machines. In adolescence, many of those branches die—through pruning. The brain is less excitable but also more efficient in carrying information.

The pruning follows a consistent pattern throughout adolescence and young adulthood starting at the back of the brain and ending at the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex regulates impulses, risk taking, planning, decision making, empathy, and insight. Research also shows that the cerebellum, recently discovered to be important for mathematics, music, decision making, social skills, and understanding
humor, continues to grow through adolescence and well into emerging adulthood. The last structure of the brain to stop growing, it develops until the mid-twenties.

Implications for social policies
What does this new brain research mean for understanding adolescent decision making and behavior? Although much more research is needed before defi nitive policies can be recommended based on the new brain research, it suggests some interesting policy considerations:

• The loss of neuronal excitation in adolescence is associated with a rise in depression, especially among adolescent females, suggesting a biological basis for the epidemiological finding that gender differences in depression start around the time of puberty. These biological changes combine with external sources of stress to increase the risk of suicide for youth in many countries of the world.
• As the brain matures during adolescence, alternations in the synaptic chemicals may influence learning (drugs for attention-deficit disorders improve information transfer at the level of the neuronal synapse). For example, antidepressive drugs may allow for certain excitatory neurotransmitters to stay in the space between two brain cells longer than otherwise.
• Learning and teaching strategies should be timed to increase neurodevelopmental capacities. Because neurodevelopmental maturation occurs at different chronological ages for different people, their inability to grasp a concept at one age does not mean that they are unable to learn the material. This speaks to the risk of educational “tracking” based on comprehension or performance examinations at a young age.
• Without a fully mature prefrontal cortex, adolescents may be more impulsive than adults and perhaps more susceptible to peer influences. This impulsiveness—especially in reactive decision making, as when faced with a situation or threatened to make an immediate decision—suggests the value of second chance programs.

It is, however, too early in the research to draw definitive conclusions about brain development and behavior. Also, physical development interacts with the social environments to determine behaviors and outcomes. So parental behaviors and expectations, effective schools, communities that are youth oriented and supportive, all make a difference in determining young people’s behavior and how well they learn complex decision-making skills.”

Source- World Development Report 2007, Box 2.9 ‘Brain development among youth: Neuroscience meets social science’, p.61 (emphasis mine)

Related;
Eye gaze and cognition in children
Glazed looks sharpen the mind
Universities: A social duty
Into the Mystery of the Adolescent Mind
A Study of Interactions: Emerging Issues in the Science of Adolescence Workshop Summary
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens

World Development Report 2007 links;
Graphs from the report
Video and Audio

Asia's Economic Success- Perspiration or Inspiration?

“For China and India, where the typical citizen is still a farmer and not an assembly line worker or a call center employee, continued productivity growth will come from the shift out of agriculture, but because a substantial portion of the population will still be employed in agriculture in these poor Asian economies for some time, an important objective of policy should be to improve agricultural productivity. For the richer Asian countries, the typical worker will increasingly be a stockbroker or a shop assistant, not a manufacturing worker. The focus there should be on improving service sector productivity. The problem here is service sector productivity has been trending downwards. Again, while governments should create an enabling environment for productivity growth by providing citizens broad-based access to education and finance as well as securing private property, they should also open to agriculture and services, especially open these to foreign competition as well as to domestic competition, so that these sectors have the same chance to generate the strong productivity growth that manufacturing has done in much of Asia.”

- Raghuram Rajan, Economic Counselor and Director of Research,IMF
Press Briefing on the Analytic Chapters of the World Economic Outlook

Ahead of His Time -Robert Mundell

The latest F&D magazine from the IMF is out. The focus is on demographics, it has also got a profile of Robert Mundell. Some excerpts below;

“He also stays strongly rooted in academia, much beloved by generations of students who have deeply valued how much he has been willing to give of himself to help them grow. He was a professor at the University of Chicago (where he was also Editor of the Journal of Political Economy) from 1966 to 1971—a time famous for its economic talents, including several other future Nobel Prize winners. "As a teacher, he was both stimulating and irritating," says Mussa, explaining that Mundell liked to tease his students with "intelligent questions that weren't entirely well structured and therefore didn't have clear answers." Since 1974, he has been a professor at Columbia University.

David Bloom, Harvard professor of economics and demography and a former Columbia colleague, recalls that the most interesting conversation he ever had with Mundell was about the effect of cross-country demographic imbalances (in age) on international capital flows—a topic that Mundell isn't normally associated with but finds enormously important for macroeconomic performance. In fact, Mundell developed a four-generation model that shows that if one country has a demographic shock, it creates a wave of interest rate changes that bring on, in an open economy, compensating capital movements. The model also highlights the role that the U.S. baby boom has played in U.S. balance of payments and budget deficits, as there was high demand for resources (some of which were internally generated and some of which flowed in from abroad) associated with investing in children.”

Related;
The Works of Robert Mundell
Mundell’s Home Page; some of books are being digitized like this one International Economics, Robert A. Mundell, New York: Macmillan

Syrian Economic Outlook

IMF released their survey of the Syrian economy- one of the few Arab countries that publishes the Article IV consultation reports. Some things that caught my eye;

“Over the medium term Syria faces daunting economic challenges. The decline of oil reserves poses a threat to fiscal and external sustainability, and the associated fall in oil revenues will make it harder to preserve, much less expand living standards. A bulge in labor market entrants will strain an already precarious unemployment situation and increase pressure to protect redundant labor in an overstaffed public sector. These challenges are further compounded by political uncertainties and a volatile regional environment. In this context, the surge in international oil prices has provided a short-term windfall but will aggravate the medium-term outlook when Syria becomes a net oil importer around the year 2010 based on current oil price projections. Based on the latest projections for oil output, staff estimates that budgetary oil revenues and net oil exports will deteriorate by more than 10 percentage points of GDP in the next 10 years.”

“Syria faces two interrelated medium-term challenges posed by the prospective decline in its oil reserves:

- The first challenge is to preserve fiscal sustainability and financial stability: with the budget still relying to the tune of 25 percent of GDP on oil revenues to finance public spending, and with these revenues projected to be halved over the next ten years, current fiscal policies are clearly unsustainable and call for a major fiscal adjustment.
- The second challenge is to boost growth in order to: (i) expand and diversify the production and export base of the economy before oil resources are exhausted, and (ii) absorb a bulge in entrants to the labor force arising from decades of very rapid population growth. With the labor force projected to increase at 4 percent a year,1 unemployment could exceed 20 percent by the end of the decade. An average employment growth rate of 4½ percent a year would need to be sustained over the next 10 years to reverse this trend—a daunting challenge.”

“Syria’s public finances are headed for challenging times in the coming 10-15 years. Oil revenues, on which the budget relies to the tune of 25 percent of GDP,4 are expected to decline rapidly over the medium term, creating a budgetary gap of some 12 percent of GDP by 2015. Unless addressed through a forward-looking fiscal policy framework (FPF), this imbalance will seriously disrupt the macroeconomic stability Syria has enjoyed in the recent past.”

“In addition to their fiscal costs and large deadweight losses, energy subsidies in Syria are very inequitable. The World Bank estimates that the richest population decile benefits 25 times more than the poorest decile, while the poorest half of the population captures less than 20 percent of total benefits.”

Related;
IMF Staff Report and Selected Issues
Interview with Bashar Asad
Central of Syria
Links to Government websites
Human Development Indicators
One in 10 Syrians live on less than $2 a day
Syria bids farewell to dollar
Syrian investment climate assessment : unlocking the potential of the private sector- World Bank Report
Doing Business Indicators; for example Dealing with Licenses, it takes 20 steps and 134 days to complete the process, and costs 359.8% of income per capita.
Syria related blogs; SyriaComment, The Damascene Blog, Syria Planet

Recent UN Reports on Development Themes

It continues to puzzle me the number of reports that continue to be published on development themes by multilateral agencies; the following list is only from the UN.

There is lot of talk about harmonization of donor practices- shouldn’t multilateral agencies harmonize production of research and reports?

The World Economic and Social Survey (WESS) 2006;

“According to the World Economic and Social Survey 2006, in the industrialized world, the income level over the last five decades has grown steadily while it has failed to do so in many developing countries, thereby causing a rise in already high world inequality.

Greater income divergence is partly explained by a rising number of growth collapses. Countries with weak economic structures and institutions and low infrastructural and human development have less capacity to gain from global markets

The importance of strong institutions and good governance for economic growth is now widely recognized. But contrary to some prescriptions, immediate institution of large-scale reform is not a necessary condition for growth, or even sometimes beneficial in the short run. The experience of China and Vietnam indicates that incremental reforms, if credible and perceived as steps along the way to further change, can be highly effective in shepherding strong and sustained growth.”

Millennium Development Goals Report 2006

World Economic Situation and Prospects 2006

“The world economy is expected to continue to grow at a rate of 3 per cent during 2006. The United States economy remains the main engine of global economic growth, but the growth of China, India and a few other large developing economies is becoming increasingly important. On average, developing economies are expected to expand at a rate of 5.6 per cent and the economies in transition at 5.9 per cent, despite the fact that these economies may face larger challenges during 2006.

Driven by higher oil prices, inflation rates have edged up worldwide. Core inflation rates, which exclude the prices of energy and food, have been more stable, indicating that the pass-through of higher oil prices to overall inflation is limited.”

Building Inclusive Financial Sectors for Development (The Blue Book)

THE LEAST DEVELOPED COUNTRIES REPORT, 2006

"UNCTAD´s Least Developed Countries Report 2006 argues that the development of domestic productive capacities and concomitant expansion of productive employment opportunities is the key to sustained economic growth and poverty reduction in the least developed countries (LDCs).

The Report calls for a paradigm shift from a consumption- and exchange-oriented approach to poverty reduction towards a production- and employment-oriented approach. It analyzes three basic constraints on the development of productive capacities in the LDCs -- poor physical infrastructure; weaknesses of the domestic private sector and supporting financial systems and knowledge systems; and insufficient demand and thus underutilization of domestic resources and capabilities as well as weak incentives to invest and innovate -- and it identifies some key policy priorities to overcome these constraints, including the mobilization of underutilized domestic potentials and a re-balancing of the sectoral allocation of aid."

For the latest UN publications see the UN Pulse blog. This is one area where other international agencies may follow
UN's lead- institutions like the WorldBank don't have a blog covering their new publications in a systematic way.

Here you can look at the titles that are popular at World Bank and IMF. This guide is also very useful- RESOURCES FOR LIBRARIANS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES.

What the yuan can learn from the yen

A policy brief from ADBI on current and future issues for the Chinese economy; deals with various issues and challenges including regional imbalance, economic reform, exchange rate, and the PRC-Japan relationship.

Related;

Growth in jobless a problem for Asia as exports surge; China's economy grows at 10%; its employment grows at 1% - UN Report.

Why China Stagnated

China and Globalization

The Looming China Crisis

The "divisible by nine" rule; The "divisible by nine" rule is a tradition that the People's Bank of China follows when it changes interest rates

US Foreign Aid Reform- Follow UK

A major study by Brookings on reforming the US foreign assistance had the following recommendation amongst many others;

“The establishment of the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID) in 1997 has proven a successful reform. DFID combines in a single cabinet agency the delivery of all overseas aid and has responsibility for analyzing the impact on developing countries of policies on trade, the environment, and conflict prevention.”

Here is report- Security by Other Means: Foreign Assistance, Global Poverty, and American Leadership

And a transcript of a conference discussing the report.

Related; How comprehensive is the new U.S. foreign assistance framework?

Poverty Rate in Iraq

“Any discussion of poverty in Iraq must contend with the security situation that has prevailed in the country over the past few years. It is hard to collect truly representative data on poverty when some parts of the country are difficult to visit and when there is substantial ongoing movement of internally displaced people, refugees, and returnees. The best available evidence suggests that Iraq has an incidence of absolute poverty that is between 8 and 10 percent, and an additional 12–15 percent of the population appears to be close enough to the $1 poverty line to be considered vulnerable (World Bank 2005). This puts Iraq at the high end of the range for countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Two notable features of the poverty profile in Iraq are a distinct regional pattern, with the northern Kurdish areas being relatively better off and the southern governorates having much higher poverty incidence rates; and a distinct gender pattern, with female-headed households having median incomes that are 15 –25 percent below comparable male-headed households.”

- Sustaining Gains in Poverty Reduction and Human Development in the Middle East and North Africa

More on the World Bank Report at Poverty and Growth Blog

Globalization with a Chinese Face!

“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough”- Albert Einstein

Shell Global Scenarios to 2025 propose three possible political environments for business. The scenarios are based on the results of the interplay between three global forces identified as efficiency, social justice and security. They are:

“Low trust globalization”, in which globalization continues but an ongoing crisis of security and trust leads to a legalistic world of overlapping and conflicting laws with intrusive checks and controls.

“Open doors”, in which cooperation between governments, investors and civil society flourishes in a pragmatic fashion producing a more transparent world.

“Flags”, in which suspicion of outsiders and conflicts over values, religion and national preferences creates regulatory fragmentation, gated communities and a dogmatic world.

Canuckflack has more on the last year’s scenario.

Related;

- Managing Globalization- a blog Daniel Altman

- OECD Forum 2006- Balancing Globalization

Redemption from Original Sin

The latest Global Development Finance report from the World Bank indicates net private capital flows to developing countries reached a record high of $491 billion in 2005.

One factor for the rapid growth might be the taming of the so called ‘Original Sin’;

"When a country is hit by a piece of bad news or a bout of political uncertainty - as Brazil was recently - investors sell off their assets and the currency plummets. If this were all that happened, the main effect would be more competitive exports and the crisis would solve itself. But since so much of emerging-market debt is denominated in foreign currency, this produces a massive increase in debt-servicing costs. Fears of payment difficulties create a vicious circle.

The core of this phenomenon is that countries cannot borrow abroad in their own currency: external debt is overwhelmingly denominated in foreign currency. In the period 1999-2001 developing countries accounted for 8 per cent of the debt but less than 1 per cent of the currency denomination.

Some would say this is so because the policies and institutions of many countries lack credibility. But this phenomenon is not peculiar to developing countries with weak policies and institutions. It affects virtually all countries except the issuers of the five main currencies. It affects countries with low inflation, balanced budgets and a reliable rule of law. Since it is not clear what countries have done to bring this problem upon themselves, it is referred to as "original sin".

More on the report by Pablo and a podcast discussing the report.

See also the virtual book tour with Ricardo Hausmann on Other People's Money: Debt Denomination and Financial Instability in Emerging Market Economies

New Evolution Model For Resolving Tragedy of the Commons

Just a quick pointer to an article that's going to be near the top of my to-read pile once I get my hands on it.

Evolution in group-structured populations can resolve the tragedy of the commons

Abstract:

Public goods are the key features of all human societies and are also important in many animal societies. Collaborative hunting and collective defence are but two examples of public goods that have played a crucial role in the development of human societies and still play an important role in many animal societies. Public goods allow societies composed largely of cooperators to outperform societies composed mainly of non-cooperators. However, public goods also provide an incentive for individuals to be selfish by benefiting from the public good without contributing to it. This is the essential paradox of cooperation—known variously as the Tragedy of the Commons, Multi-person Prisoner's Dilemma or Social Dilemma. Here, we show that a new model for evolution in group-structured populations provides a simple and effective mechanism for the emergence and maintenance of cooperation in such a social dilemma. This model does not depend on kin selection, direct or indirect reciprocity, punishment, optional participation or trait-group selection. Since this mechanism depends only on population dynamics and requires no cognitive abilities on the part of the agents concerned, it potentially applies to organisms at all levels of complexity.

And for those of you with some programming interests, they also include a link to the source code for their evolutionary model (PDF).

Iraqi Date Merchant and Mobile Phones

“I buy and sell dates and my whole business is now dependent on the mobile phone. Trading in dates (like any other commodity) is a risky business characterized by significant price fluctuations, especially during the harvest season. Prior to having access to a mobile phone, I faced great difficulty in obtaining timely information about price variations. This delay in obtaining up-to-date prices sometimes resulted in significant losses, whereby I would sell a lot of dates at a low price. Since I bought my mobile phone, I am in continuous contact with the date trade exchange center which helps me strike deals at the right price”.

That’s an Iraqi date merchant taking about the importance of mobile phone in his business. Other highlights from a report on the socio-economic role of mobile phones in the Arab middle-east;

- Mobile revenues accounted for 5% of the increase in GDP in Bahrain between 2002-04
- In Jordan, the number of employees in the mobile sector increased by 42% over the 4yr period of liberalization
- Many mobile operators represent more than 30% percent of a total stock market – such as Egypt’s Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange
- 95% of Iraqis use their phone to ensure the safety of their loved ones, 83% of Iraqis see it as a necessity in life, and 77% said it made life easier

According to some estimates a developing country with an extra 10 phones per 100 people between 1996 and 2003 would have had GDP growth 0.59% higher than an otherwise identical country ( often these studies are financed by telephone companies);

To illustrate these findings, Mr Waverman considers Indonesia (nine mobile phones per 100 people) and the Philippines (27 phones per 100 people). Long-run growth in the Philippines, he suggests, could be a percentage point higher than in Indonesia if this gap is maintained. But if Indonesia closed the gap, its growth rate would match that of the Philippines. Mr Waverman also notes, however, that there is a large education gap between the two countries. His model predicts that bridging this divide would boost Indonesia's growth rate even more than closing the mobile gap. “Mobile phones are important, but so is education and health care,” he says. “A lot of things are required for growth.” He concludes by calling for regulatory policies that favour competition and encourage the speediest possible spread of mobile telephony. For policymakers interested in closing the “digital divide” to boost growth, the message is clear: mobile phones are the most effective means of doing so.

And liberalization and new technology helps. Look at India.

According to the stats available for January, the telecom sector in India added 5 million new subscribers, of which 4.75 were mobile connections. That's about 167,000 new subscribers (of which 158,000 are mobile users) being added *every day*. By comparison, in the pre-reform period (I am using 1974-1989 data here, though it's even lower pre-1974), India added about 175,000 new connections *every year*.

Now the World Bank has released a brand new report Information and Communications for Development 2006: Global Trends and Policies which takes stock of the progress that has been achieved worldwide in rolling out access to affordable ICT and provides evidence on what makes for success in adopting ICT to meet development challenges. The report also highlights some stark differences as well;

While the developing world has seen huge progress in rollout of basic ICT infrastructure, the picture is more mixed for advanced use of ICT. Worldwide, Internet use more than quadrupled between 2000 and 2005, but differences in the number of secure Internet servers, a proxy for the availability of e-commerce, remain stark. While developed nations have more than 300 such servers per 1 million people, developing nations have fewer than 2.

Are there any people who hate mobile phones? Once a taxi driver (in Male’, Maldives) complained to me that since mobile phones have become so popular, people have reduced taxi trips- Maldives used to have the highest mobile tariffs in the South Asia. In terms of mobile phone subscribers there were over 113,000 subscribers (out of a total population of 280,000). In the US mobile subscribers stood at 615 per 1000 at end 2004. In very small countries like Maldives foreign parties like the Wataniya are interested mostly because they can use the place as a test bed for new technologies.

Related Links:

- Impact of Mobile Phones in Africa, Vodafone
- Socio-Economic Impact of Mobile Phones in Arab World
- Financing ICT Investment in the Developing World
- Telephone is a weapon against poverty
- At A Glace Tables from the World Bank Report; 30 ICT Indicators for 144 Countries; it’s best such of indicators I have seen.