Reader response 1

According to the article reported by Euromonitor international (2011), the growth in developing countries are slowly catching up due to the rapid economic growth. I disagree that these developing countries have greater potential than developed countries, 

According to statistics that Euromonitor provide, it is definitely true that these developing countries are catching up. However, there is definitely doubt in the sustainability of these claims displayed by the statistics. There are many different contributing factors when it comes to the measurement of a country’s economic growth. The statistics provided serves as a platform to come out with a hypothesis but it is still not a definite indicator to depict the overall picture of the situation. It is definitely true that the broadband diffusion rates in developing countries has been growing relatively fast as compared to developed countries. In addition, this might not be representative as a whole country.

Base on information obtain from Nanjing marketing group (2011), out of the total internet users in china, only 27.3% come from rural areas while majority of china’s users come from urban areas. This statistic starts questioning to whether the growth would hit a ceiling as internet penetration to urban areas is so much higher than those in rural areas. This also bring the question that would internet continue to grow in rural areas with the limitations of IT infrastructure foundations in those areas. The Chinese government has been channeling its resources to urban cities such as shanghai and Beijing to continue to spur economic growth towards china’s journey of becoming an economical power in the world, the question is, would the Chinese government source some of its resources to rural areas? They probably would not do so in the short run. This would happen but then it definitely would take quite some time to take shape as the basic foundation of building a modernized city is not as easy as it seems, it requires quite a large amount of money, planning and also time. 

This brings me to the point of the contribution of wealth. According to BBC News (2014), the higher end to the social class of China, people are becoming wealthier as time goes by and is spending more money, but it still does not prove that the wealth is being distribute fairly as the rich is becoming richer while the poor is not becoming richer or even worse, they are declining in wealth. This applies to people especially in the rural areas. This shows that statistics are just a consensus of the whole country on average and not a true representative. This then conclude that things cannot be seen in  such a way that is assume that everyone is equally affluent.

In addition to the point mention previously, there are also a number of contributing factors in determining a country growth in terms of the digital divide. An economy might be hit by certain uncontrollable factors such as financial crisis, natural disasters and political instability. Financial woes might cause currency crisis, for example the Great Depression, which was preceded in many countries by bank runs and stock market crashes. This would then result in the downfall of an economy and indirectly it would also affect the digital divide when there is less absolute resources to distribute and channel amongst the different industries in a country.   Natural disasters such as the Japanese tsunami can bring down the economy overnight, where resources are being channel to do recovery work. While political instability, such as the protests in Thailand can deter investors to invest in the country. These factors are examples that the economic sustainability in the long run would not be definite and cannot be controlled or accurately hypothesis by the sole use of statistics.
 

References:

Euromonitor International. (2011, February 2). Global digital divide persists but is narrowing. Retrieved August 25, 2014, from http://blog.euromonitor.com/2011/02/global-digital-divide-persists-but-is-narrowing-1.html

BBC news. (2014, Feb 2) Affluence of Chinese is growing. Retrieved September 6, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20140203-the-rise-of-chinas-wealth-dragon

Nanjing marketing. (2011, Oct 28). China rural urban internet usage. Retrieved September 6, 2014, http://www.nanjingmarketinggroup.com/blog/rural-chinese-internet-usage-2011_10_27