One of the Series 1 figures I popped open the base and removed the electronics (an idea I got after speaking to I-Wei Huang of Toys For Bob about how his children responded to electronic-less prototypes), effectively removing the toys-to-life aspect of the figure.
To roughly calculate, I build on a study of 120 countries by Christine Zhen-Wei Qiang of the World Bank that found that a 10 percent increase in mobile phone penetration correlates with a 0.8 percent average increase in GDP growth.