loss of life that occurred and the political cost of evidential fraud. Spending this money on mobile phones and mobile infrastructure to enable voters to vote by phone is a viable alternative for elections in countries with limited democratic experience and would deliver the added benefit of a sustainable microeconomy on the Kenyan model. Healthcare is an additional potential application based on the integration of M Health and M Wealth (poverty eradication using access technology). 12.7.9 Universal Narrowband Access in Survival Economies - The Impact on Developed and Emerging Economies So if we diverted universal broadband infrastructure spending in developed and emerging economies and invested the equivalent amount, several hundred billion dollars, into universal narrowband access in survival economies what would happen? 6 http://www.wri.org/. Making Telecoms Work We would suggest that globally there would be a net social, political and economic gain. Survival economies would move more rapidly to become emerging economies, in turn creating new markets for the developed world to serve. Attempts have been made to quantify this. The World Bank estimates that a 10% growth in broadband connectivity delivers 1.3% of GDP growth. In the wireless telecoms economy it is evident that profits in saturated developed economies are flat at best. Being forced into meeting universal broadband access obligations by wireless or other means will introduce additional cost and minimal profit. It is plausible that the taxpayer will absorb some of this investment pain but this hardly seems credible in today's international political climate. Given the growing interdependency of countries around the world it seems odd that the potential for survival economies to be the new engine of global social, political and economic progress has been largely ignored. Partly, this may be due to fear of the unknown. For example, there is an argument that suggests that growth in emerging and survival economies will trigger large increases in carbon em