Alastre (2013) Inversión en telecomunicaciones y crecimiento económico en latinoamérica (original) (raw)

ABSTRACT The main goal of this paper is to confirm the existence of correlation between the investment in telecommunication and economic growth in south Americans countries. To accomplish this goal, this paper answers the following questions: Which is the relationship between investment in telecommunication and economic growth in different regions of the world? What percentage of GDP do south American countries invest in telecommunications? How are these levels of investment in comparison to other regions? And Is there a correlation between investment levels and economic growth in south American countries? For this, a quantitative study is done in the investment in telecommunications and GDP growth at constant prices, specifically between 1.990 and 2.011, with data from the World Bank, Venezuelan Central Bank, among others institutions, this study is compared with the theory building in telecommunications and with investment done in different regions. This comparison allowed the author to conclude that the investment in telecommunication has a possitive and sustained impact in the economic growth. However, this possitive correlation was not present in south America, with the exception of Colombia, in spite of being similar to other regions on the world as percentage of GDP. This behavior is because these countries have not reached the critical investment mass required. This observation was confirmed for Venezuela, in spite of the growth of the economic activity of telecommunication in its GDP. Keywords: Telecommunication investment, Information and communications Technologies, economic growth, economic development, knowledge economy, information society, South America, Venezuela, Colombia.