Of internet cafes and power cuts

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: Within a few months China will overtake America as the country with the world’s largest number of internet users. Even when you factor in China’s size and its astonishing rate of GDP growth, this will be a remarkable achievement for what remains a poor economy. For the past three years China has also been the world’s largest exporter of information and communications technology (ICT).

China is by no means the only emerging economy in which new technology is being eagerly embraced. In frenetic Mumbai, everyone seems to be jabbering non-stop on their mobile phones. In Africa, people who live in mud huts use mobile phones to pay bills or to check fish prices and find the best market for their catch.

Yet this picture of emerging-market technarcadia is belied by parallel accounts of misery and incompetence. Last year ants ate the hard drive of a photographer in Thailand. Last fortnight, internet usage from Cairo to Kolkata was disrupted after something—probably an earthquake—sliced through two undersea cables. Personal computers have spread slowly in most emerging economies: three-quarters of low-income countries have fewer than 15 PCs per 1,000 people—and many of those computers are gathering dust.

And the feting of prominent technology projects in emerging economies is sometimes premature. Nicholas Negroponte, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has long been championing a $100 laptop computer. The laptop was supposed to sweep through poor countries. But the project is behind schedule, the computer does not work properly and one prominent backer, Intel, a chipmaker, has pulled out.

So how well are emerging economies using new technology, really? Hitherto, judgments have had to be based largely on anecdotes. Now the World Bank has supplemented the snapshot evidence with more comprehensive measures.

The bank has drawn up indices based on the usual array of numbers: computers and mobile phones per head, patents and scientific papers published; imports of high-tech and capital goods. The results, laid out last month in the bank’s annual Global Economic Prospects report, measure technological progress in its broadest sense: as the spread of ideas, techniques and new forms of business organisation.