To do with the price of fish
May 10, 2007, The Economist
The Economist reviews a paper by Robert Jensen, a developmental economist at Harvard University, who found that use of mobile phones by fishermen in Kerala promoted economic activity. The article suggests that under the right state-provisioned regulatory environments, mobile phones are a sustainable way to empower local communities with information and contribute to growth. Jensen used the gradual spread of phone coverage to discover that mobile phones enabled fishermen to call ahead to markets to find out where their catch would fetch the highest price. The availability of this information led to increased market efficiency so that consumer prices went down, fishermen's profits went up, waste was minimised, and phones quickly paid for themselves. While critics of such studies claim the causality between mobile phone use and growth is difficult to determine, studies like Jensen's nevertheless show how phones can make people better off.