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).
