Monday, March 07, 2011

Joblessness + Phone ownership = Unrest?


Here is an interesting graph I pulled together in the course of a project I am working on. It uses data from the World Bank (for the phone subscriptions data) and the ILO and others for youth unemployment. It plots youth unemployment rates against mobile phone ownership (subscriptions per 100 people). Countries above the line have disproportionately high mobile phone ownership given their rate of unemployment: in other words their people are both jobless and well-connected: to one another and the outside world (A recent survey showed that 45% of people in the Middle East use their phones to access the internet).