Description

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Mobile phones are spreading ubiquitously across the planet. They are considered a common manifestation of the latest phase of globalization, along with Chinese consumer goods and Indian IT services. With more than three billion subscribers around the world, mobile phones have out-diffused virtually every prior technology, whether TV sets, radios, wrist watches, wallets, wireline phones, or bicycles, and have done so in the past 25 years. Mobile phones are now used by about half of the world's population. However, it is the baffling degree of variation in how they have been adopted in different parts of the world and the wide range of explanations of the variation. In the emerging world, mobile penetration rates vary substantially