Thank you very much. These were indeed very worth spent 15 minutes ;)

I knew your model was just to describe a scenario, but I wondered how to possibly make it more realistic (-:

Out of curiosity, if you have the dataset already ready and 15 spare minutes, try this primitive analysis. Let’s not consider linear or logistic trend but just absolute magnitude and give the meaning of “shrinking” just as “reducing”. For each country calculate this:

X=│(Xt-1)-(Lt-1)│-│(Xt)-(Lt)│

where X is the country under analysis, L is the leading country, t-1 is the value of 2007, and t the value of 2008. Both subtractions should be taken as absolute value. Plot the results as you did with your example and see what it come out, my intuition may be completely wrong (-:

Sorry if I misled anyone, but I did not pretend to describe a “model”, but just to picture how whould a shrinking divide look like. And to make it clearer, I made the radical assumption of shortening distances by half (it’s always useful to go to the extremes to make examples more clear).

But, definitely, that was no model, no forecast, no anything: just a didactic device ;)

Thanks, very interesting post! I liked your approach but I wonder how much your hypothetical model can fit into the reality. We know that a technological adaption – as mobile penetration – usually follows a logistic trend (or a similar one, e.g. Gompertz curve), therefore assuming that last year the digital divide have reduced by magnitude of half could be possible only if an economy is over the inflection point of the curve. And I suspect that that situation is unlikely for most of the countries.

Does it make any sense to you? If so, can somehow your model embed this trend? Possibly my comment is plain wrong (-: