Asia BOP

Report

A LIRNEasia paper by Harsha de Silva and Ayesha Zainudeen, ‘Teleuse on a Shoestring’, examining the perceived economic impact of telecom access at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ based on a large household survey across Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Thailand. Presented at the Centre for Poverty Analysis’s 2007 symposium in Colombo, the paper finds that while some telecom users perceive significant economic benefits from phone ownership through increased income generation or reduced transaction costs, this effect is uneven and not universal across the sampled population.