Category: Economics
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ICTs and Emissions – III
The Abode is a Humongous Shopping Mall As some pundits have observed, data centers (DCs) are the backbone of the digital realm—hiding in plain sight, I would add. However, DCs do not live alone in their noisy, albeit warm homes. They cannot afford to for existential, not financial, reasons. DCs depend on several other beings…
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ICTs and Emissions – II
Cyberspace Mansions In 2009, amid the Global Financial Crisis, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) announced plans to create a 1.2 billion dollar data center (DC) in Utah. Indeed, surveillance once again proved it is immune to economic disasters, regardless of magnitude. In any case, actual construction began only in 2011, after government approval. The…
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ICTs and Emissions – I
Digital technologies’ social ubiquitousness is indisputable. Indeed, escaping their mantra seems unreal, almost dystopic, regardless of location or connectivity. The TINA (there is no alternative) principle appears to be entirely at work here. It is thereby paradoxical that new ICTs are conspicuously absent from big-ticket global climate change policy documents such as the 1997 Kyoto…
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RegTech is Here!
Modern FinTech saw the light of day with the launching of ATM machines in the late 60s. A few years later, NASDAQ was born, credit cards exploded and banks started to deploy mainframes and minicomputer computers to support their operations. The 1990s brought both the Internet and the consolidation of global financialization that accelerated Fintech’s…
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Economic Growth and Sustainable Development
In a previous entry, I explored the connections between digital technologies, economic growth and the environment, using the concept of Sustainable Development (SD) as analytical reference. The figure below depicts yet another way to see the three development outcomes that must interact to trigger SD. Three other outcomes are also possible if the interaction…
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More Light on Financial Inclusion
In a couple of recent posts, I briefly traced the history of financial inclusion and its links to the emergence and diffusion of digital technologies. A recently published book by Nick Bernards tackles the same issue more comprehensively while taking a more critical perspective. His departing point, however, is not financial inclusion but rather poverty…
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Digital Technologies and Sustainable Development
1. Overall context Much water has already gone under the bridge on this topic. Yet the flow shows no signs of coming to a halt soon. In the early days of the so-called “Internet revolution,” only a few were connecting the two. At the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which I had…
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Financial Inclusion and Democratizing Finance – III
Show me the money The impact of initiatives such as Grameen Bank (Village phone included) and M-Pesa is still under discussion. From a poverty reduction perspective, the effect has been much more limited. Many countries in the Global South have managed until recently to reduce the number of people living in extreme poverty. Take Bangladesh.…
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Financial Inclusion and Democratizing Finance – II
Where are the banks? It seems paradoxical that the mainstream history of micro-finance/financial inclusion does not consider banks. After all, banks are supposed to “bank the unbanked.” So banks are not only missing from such a narrative. They are also missing in action on the ground. In principle, banks are the institutions that should cater…
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Financial Inclusion and Democratizing Finance – I
From Noise to Signal A couple of weeks ago, El Salvador’s CryptoPopulist President shared on social media news about an international “Bitcoin” meeting his country was hosting starting May 16. He also listed the names of the 44 entities participating in the event. Not surprisingly, key countries were conspicuously absent. Regardless, the Crypto hype press…
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Open Data and Big Pharma
In 1980, the U.S. Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act that modified patent and trademark law by allowing universities and small businesses to own inventions created under the funding of the Federal Government. Its core idea was to expedite the commercialization of innovations as the country, according to bill supporters, was seemingly falling behind Japan and…
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The Environment and “Socialist” States
Thirty-six years after it first broke the news for the wrong reasons, Chernobyl is back in the headlines thanks to the horrible and absurd Russian invasion. Sixteen months before the well-known Soviet nuclear meltdown of 1986, a plant located in Bhopal, India, owned and run by a private U.S corporation, released a lethal gas into…
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ICTs and Development Theories – II
Linking ICTs to development External researchers and experts poking for the first time into ICTD might assume that the field has, 30 years after its birth, a cohesive theory on how ICTs impact development. Unfortunately, that is not the case. If ICTD was a digital platform, we could conclude that its middleware seems to be…
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ICTs and Development Theories – I
ICTD overview The field of ICTD first saw the light over 30 years ago1 Selected references are provided at the end of the 2nd part of this post. Its overall scope is ambitious as it covers several sectors and thematic areas. Indeed, ICTD comprises three core elements: ICTs, development – yet another large and complex…
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State Capacity and Digital Technologies – I
To the Moon and Back It was my elder sister’s 25th birthday when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. We watched the unprecedented event on B&W TV – our grandma openly expressing total skepticism. We then went out for a family celebration. Funny, I still vividly remember the restaurant where we dined, which, needless to…