A submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the sea bed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean. Many of these cables were established in the early 90's and are used extensively around the world for internet and data communication. These cables greatly impact the overall internet usage of a country.
GDP is a monetary measure of the value of all final goods and services produced in a period, and it is arguably the most famous indicator of economic activity of a country. When we divide a GDP by the population of a country, we get GDP per capita, which is then an indicator for the average amount that a person makes.
We believed that there should be a correlation between the construction of these cables, and an improvement in not only the country's total economic growth, but growth on a personal basis. Our thought process was that having the internet should have positive effects on education and productivity, and thus lead to an increase in GDP per capita, especially in countries that are just beginning to ramp up development. You can decide if we were right or wrong by clicking and hovering to explore the map below!
Purely from the country coloring, we can see that South America and Asia seem to be having very rapid growth. Europe and Africa also seem to have sections with fast growing GDP per capita. Focusing on the purple lines (recently created or planned cables), we see a few being constructed around South America, many around the Mediterranean and Arabian seas, and a multitude being constructed in East Asia. This would indicate that companies are now focusing on areas of fast development and future promise. By clickng around in the map, we can see that many new companies are investing more on new cables highly concentrated in the Africa/Asia region. Therefore, there does seem to be a pattern, but it is by no means a perfect correlation. The fact that we used percentage growth also makes it harder for established countries to have growth that competes with 3rd world countries as well.
We did notice a trend, in which the construction of submarine cables seems to be a leading indicator of economic growth for many of the developing countries. That would make sense, as investing in infrastructure, such as submarine cables, should lead to future growth. Countries such as Ecuador, Colombia, Nigeria and many others show this trend. By clicking on these countries we can see that the addition of early submarine cables is accompanied by an increase in overall GDP per capita.