Les limites du leapfrogging

Le bond technologique que représente l'adoption de la téléphonie mobile est-il réplicable aux autres domaines? Est-il possible grâce aux nouvelles technologies de faire progresser des domaines aussi divers que l'éducation, la santé etc... Mon avis? Oui et non, le digital venant toujours comme complément à l'industriel.

Deux réponses dans ce sens dans le magazine The Economist de cette semaine :

• The limits of leapfrogging. "The World Bank concludes that a country's capacity to absorb and benefit from new technology depends on the availability of more basic forms of infrastructure. This has clear implications for development policy. Building a fibre-optic backbone or putting plasma screens into schools may be much more glamorous than building electrical grids, sewerage systems, water pipelines, roads, railways and schools. It would be great if you could always jump straight to the high-tech solution, as you can with mobile phones. But with technology, as with education, health care and economic development, such short-cuts are rare. Most of the time, to go high-tech, you need to have gone medium-tech first."

• Technology in emerging countries : of Internet cafés & power cuts. (Petit aparté : le titre m'a bien fait rigoler, tant il sonne juste dans le contexte Camerounais. Merci qui? merci AES-Sonel!) Cet article intéressant fait la distinction nette entre l'absorption de la technologique et sa diffusion de masse qui s'opèrent en des temps distincts. "Broadly, two sets of obstacles stand in the way of technological progress in emerging economies. The first is their technological inheritance. Most advances are based on the labours of previous generations: you need electricity to run computers and reliable communications for modern health care, for instance. So countries that failed to adopt old technologies are at a disadvantage when it comes to new ones. Mobile phones, which require no wires, are a prominent exception. (...) The other set of problems has to do with the intangible things that affect a country's capacity to absorb technology: education; R&D; financial systems; the quality of government. In general, developing countries' educational levels have soared in the past decade or so. Middle-income countries have achieved universal primary-school enrolment and poor countries have increased the number of children completing primary school dramatically. Even so, illiteracy still bedevils some middle-income countries and many poor ones."

Source image : The Economist

Tags: leapfrogging, technology in emerging countries