Though conventional international economic wisdom holds China's hardware and India's software industries to be equipotential, little attempt has been made to compare their information industries in an overarching dynamic framework. By using a schema which links intellectual to financial value...

Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan, the most ambitious scheme ever undertaken by India in secondary education, plans on raising grade completion levels and reducing gender inequity by increasing the supply of schools “within a reasonable distance”. But what are the expected returns from...

This paper investigates information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) projects from around the world. It finds that computer and Internet promotion schemes usually fail despite active support, but mobile penetration in even the poorest countries is deepening organically. It...

Infrastructure is loosely understood to be the physical and structural features of a country which constitute its skeletal and arterial systems. The citizens of any country are, however, its greatest assets. In that sense, the most important infrastructure should be that which affects the...

In some technology sectors in India, particularly in software services, public policies and private initiative have yielded rapid growth and good private and social returns. But this has not been true for the case of the Internet, more so for broadband. There is strong belief among technologists...

Telecommunications services in the US are not federally micro-managed. Internet service provision has enjoyed a high degree of freedom at the federal, state, and local levels until now, and this is likely to persist in the near future. Confusion about the existence, extent, and direction of a...

Sharp declines in semiconductor prices are largely responsible for observed declines in computer prices. Although communications equipment also has a large semiconductor content, communications equipment prices do not fall nearly as fast as computer prices. This paper partly resolves the puzzle...

“Moore's Law” in the semiconductor manufacturing industry is used to describe the predictable historical evolution of a single manufacturing technology platform that has been continuously reducing the costs of fabricating electronic circuits since the mid-1960s. Some features of its future...

The impact of patent pools on the rate and direction of technological change is an open question in both theoretical and empirical studies. Economic theory makes no unequivocal prediction. By contrast, empirical studies of patent pools, to date, have largely concluded that patent pools have been...