| You can't put physical cash into the mobile banking. Yes you can. You can typically deposit without fees at airtime resellers and cell network retail outlets. Faster and cheaper than traveling to a bank branch. Fees to cash out/send/receive money are as low as 0.22%. Could I go without a cellphone? Absolutely. I could go to a landline. But thats not the point here. This article and my question were more about the phone's ability to replace a credit/debit card and bank account, not a landline. To call someone over a fair price.... but you have to know those people in the first place... If you were buying a car, who would you call to compare prices? You call your family members, previous buyers, or middlemen in cities to get a rough sense of the market price. There are startups that offer crop price data via SMS. http://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/how-mobile-phones-are-tra... [Women invest more in the health and well-being of their families — as much as 10 times more] ... That sounds like a gender based stereotype. Clicking through on the links in the NYT article went to this article in Science (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6202/1273.full.pdf) which cites the following four sources for those statistics: World Bank, World Development Report 2012: Gender
Equality and Development (World Bank, Washington,
DC, 2011); http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/book/10.1596/
978-0-8213-8810-5. D. Thomas, in Intrahousehold Resource Allocation in
Developing Countries: Models, Methods and Policy, L. Haddad,
J. Hoddinott, H. Alderman, Eds. (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
Baltimore, MD, 1997), pp. 142–164. R. L. Blumberg, Ed., Engendering Wealth and Well-Being:
Empowerment for Global Change (Latin America in Global
Perspective) (Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1995). E. Duflo, “Women’s empowerment and economic
development,” working paper 17702 (National Bureau of
Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2011); available at
www.nber.org/papers/w17702 |
That's quite true. Even in developer (but not first-world) countries like Argentina, lots of stores and supermarkets allow you to push cash into your mobile phone. There's probably about 3 such places less than two blocks from home.
Personally, I just use online banking. But I feel that the newer generation (eg: those under 22) don't.