World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends
Digital technologies have spread rapidly in much of the world. Digital dividends—that is, the broader development benefits from using these technologies—have lagged behind. In many instances, digital technologies have boosted growth, expanded opportunities, and improved service delivery. Yet their aggre – gate impact has fallen short and is unevenly distributed. For digital technologies to benefit everyone everywhere requires closing the remaining digital divide, especially in internet access. But greater digital adoption will not be enough. To get the most out of the digital revolution, countries also need to work on the “analog complements”—by strengthening regula – tions that ensure competition among businesses, by adapting workers’ skills to the demands of the new economy, and by ensuring that institutions are accountable.
I contributed to Spotlight 5 "Enabling Digital Development: The Data Revolution", in which the World Bank presentes two of my graphs:
Data is available at http://bit.do/WDR2016-FigS5_1 & http://bit.do/WDR2016-FigS5_2
…unfortunatelly, the written text missinterprets the presented data (i.e. in Figure S5.1), as it states that "Digital data overtook analog around 1998, and in 2013 amounted to 46 billion trillion bytes". As the graph clearly shows, "digital data overtook analog around 2002" (which is consistent with our previous estimates), and that it amounts to 3.3 zettabytes in 2013 and, as correctly stated in the attached data of the report, to 4.8 zettabytes in 2014 (one zettabyte havin 21 0s, and therefore being a "billion trillion".
