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Internet Trends in Developing Countries
Nalini Sewak
Abstract— In this paper, I intend to present an effective visualization that examines the relationship between the prevalence of
Internet/ number of Interet users and various social, economic and political factors in developing countries. Using world bank
data for eight developing nations over the world, this study aims to test few hypotheses and visualize the correlation of various
developmental indicators such as unemployment, literacy rate etc. and internet usage.
Index Terms— Internet, Developing Countries
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1 INTRODUCTION
T
ODAY, the Internet is increasingly making its presence
felt, not only playing an important role in research and
education but also serving as a catalyst to a country’s
socio–economic, cultural and political development. It is
therefore not a surprise that the Internet has become a
development of the highest significance.
The results of this project will show the correlation of internet prevelance and various developmental indicators
identified by the world bank for countries.
Fund, BRICS, Next Eleven etc. These countries are:
 Brazil
 China
 Egypt
 India
 Indonesia
 Mexico
 Phillipines
 Russia
3.2 DEVELOPMENTAL INDICATORS
2 MOTIVATION
As of 2014, three billion people were online. This is an
incredible milestone, but it also means that only 40 percent of the world’s population has ever connected to the
Internet. In the developed world, about 76 percent of the
population is online, but according to research, the figure
is just 29.8 percent in developing nations.
The rate of growth of Internet users was just 6.6 percent
in 2014, the fourth year of deceleration. At present rates
of decelerating growth, the Internet won’t reach four billion
people until 2019.
By correlating socio-economic, cultural and political factors to internet prevalence in developing nations, this paper seeks to convey the importance of developing internet
infrastructure especially in developing nations.
3 OVERVIEW
This section covers the developing countries selected,
developmental indicators that will be considered and
sample hypotheses for this research. This will help get
finer details during the implementation phase.
The primary World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially-recognized international
sources presents the most current and accurate global
development data available, and includes national, regional and global estimates. I intend to look at a variety of
these developmental indicators for the chosen countries
to correlate with internet usage.
Preliminary research of my project suggestions using developmental indicators grouped by:
 Education
o Unemployment rate
o Literacy rate
 Economy and growth
o GDP per capita
 Infrastructure
o Secure Internet servers
I will investigate more of these indicators in other categories such as science and technology, social development, poverty and urban development.
3.3 HYPOTHESES
Developing nations stand to massively beneift by improving citizens access to internet.
3.1 COUNTRIES SELECTED
The research will be carried out on 8 developing nations.
These countries were selected on the basis of the largest
emerging markets. There countries are recognised in various emerging market lists such as International Monetory
With more accessible internet, the citizens are more informed. Internet represents free information, ease of information transfer and communication which could lead to
more literacy. I would like to test this hypothesis and pre-
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sent it in an easy to digest visualization.
I plan to test further hypotheses based on other discussed
developmental indicators.
4 CONCLUSION
This project hopes to gather useful insights and prove the
importance of internet prevalence in developing nations
by showing good correlation to various developmental
indicators in each nation.
REFERENCES
[1]
W ORLD BANK DATA: DEVELOPMENT INDICATORS & BY
COUNTRY http://data.worldbank.org/
[2] EMERGING MARKETS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_markets#Commonl
y_listed
FACTORS AFFECTING INTERNET DEVELOPMENT: AN
ASIAN SURVEY
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1118/1
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[3]