This week's Economist has a leader which takes a strong line on technology in the developing world: mobile phones are more important than computers.
Why?
Plenty of evidence suggests that the mobile phone is the technology with the greatest impact on development. A new paper finds that mobile phones raise long-term growth rates, that their impact is twice as big in developing nations as in developed ones, and that an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country increases GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points.
And when it comes to mobile phones, there is no need for intervention or funding from the UN: even the world's poorest people are already rushing to embrace mobile phones, because their economic benefits are so apparent. Mobile phones do not rely on a permanent electricity supply and can be used by people who cannot read or write.
The digital divide that really matters, then, is between those with access to a mobile network and those without.
It's a powerful argument, and hard to argue with (not that I'm arguing). But does it mean that developments such as the $100 computer are pointless?
