October 4th, 2008
Breakout Years in Adoption of Communications Technologies in BRIC Countries
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(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)
Here’s a brilliant TED presentation by Hans Rosling on how to look differently at development indicators across countries and continents, using Gapminder’s trend visualization tool Trendalyzer –
I spent an hour playing around with Gapmindmer and discovered some interesting trends related to the diffusion of communications technologies in BRIC countries.
In all these charts comparing Brazil, Russia, India, China and United States, the X axis represents the income per person (in fixed PPP$) on a logarithmic scale while the Y axis changes. By pressing the ‘play’ button, you can see how the variable changes for these five countries over years.
Let’s start with the Y axis representing the number of cell phones users on a logarithmic scale. It’s fascinating how each country seems to stay close to the X axis until something happens and it rises vertically. It happens to the USA in 1980, China in 1986, Brazil in 1989, Russia in 1990 and India in 1994. As of now, these five countries have the biggest cell phone user bases across the world1 (China at #1 with 601 million, India at #2 with 305 million, USA at #3 with 260 million, Russia at #4 with 172 million and Brazil at #5 with 135 million).
If you change the Y axis to represent the number of cell phones per 100 people on a logarithmic scale, you see a similar trend but the years are different — USA (1985), Brazil (1993), China (1994), Russia (1995) and India (1998). Do notice that the lag for China is 8 years but the lag for all other countries is around 4-5 years, indicating that China was almost weighed down by its high population.
In both the charts for the number of personal computers and the number of personal computers per 100, there are no such break-out years and the growth is diagonal rather than vertical.
We see these break-out years again in the chart for the number of internet users per 100 on a logarithmic scale — Russia (1994), Brazil (1995), China (1997) and India (1998) — but the vertical climb is slower than cell phone penetration.
Finally the chart with the number of broadband subscribers has a different breakout sequence — Brazil (1997), China (1998), India (2000), Russia (2001) — a trend also seen in the chart with the number of broadband subscribers per 100 — Brazil (1997), China (2000), India (2001), Russia (2002).
I’m not even sure if looking for breakout years on a logarithmic chart is a valid way of looking at technology adoption, but it does suggest some interesting stories. It will be fun to look beyond the data and string together these stories, but that’s another evening, another post.
References
- 1 Wikipedia: List of countries by number of mobile phones in use.
