One always-present issue when looking at any particular social or economic problem is that we always face multiple problems at the same time. Drug overdoses, malnutrition, carbon and methane emissions, traffic, inflation, joblessness, homelessness, lack of medical care, uneven or inadequate educational opportunities, domestic violence, fair treatment of ehtnic, racial, religious or other minorities, corruption, crime and many other problems have to be tackled simultaneously.
And it never is possible to rank order all of those problems in terms of allocating resources to solve the problems, in a holistic way, in real time, even assuming we have our means-ends causality chains correctly understood.
In that vein, the “digital divide” is a bigger problem some places, compared to others, even if it can be seen as a problem no matter where we find it.
That clearly is the case for people in many lower-income or middle-income countries, where internet access in lower-income countries exceeds four percent of monthly gross domestic product, for example.
In most middle-income countries greater progress has been made, with costs below the International Telecommunications Union target of two percent of monthly GDP.
In developed countries, the problems are mostly confined to rural areas or high-cost areas, as monthly recurring costs are below one percent of GDP. There still are issues to be solved, but they are relatively trivial compared to other problems we also face.
source: ITU
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