Leapfrogging in mobile telephony: A measure for comparing country performance
James,M.J.
James,M.J.
Abstract
There is widespread agreement as to what constitutes leapfrogging in technology and also that mobile phones are a good example of this phenomenon. What is lacking in the literature, however, is any attempt to operationalize the notion of leapfrogging in a way that allows us to rank different countries. The purpose of this paper accordingly is to provide such a measure using both the ratio of mobile to fixed telephones and a weighting of this ratio for a particular country by its share in the total number of mobile phones in the sample. The proposed measure yields a number of insights that cannot be gained by using only the ratio of mobile to fixed telephones. Yet, for a number of the best performing countries this ratio is very much in evidence.
Description
Date
2009
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Research Projects
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Journal Issue
Keywords
SDG 9 - Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
Citation
James, M J 2009, 'Leapfrogging in mobile telephony : A measure for comparing country performance', Technological Forecasting and Social Change, vol. 76, no. 7, pp. 991-998.