Educational Levels and the Impact of ICT on Economic Growth: Evidence of a Cointegrated Panel (original) (raw)

2015, International Journal of Business and Social Research

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the long-run relation between economic growth and access to telecommunications services, comprising mobile telephony, fixed telephony, and broadband. We examine the differentiated impact on economic growth for a sample of twelve countries, divided according their educational level, i.e. high, medium, and low. The role of telecommunications alone on economic growth is limited unless is also accompanied by parallel investments in education; only this joint effort can provide a deep impact on growth due to a more efficient use of those technologies. Three panel data analysis are applied, one for each group of countries; the econometric analysis includes unit tests root tests, cointegration tests to examine the presence of long-term relationships, and an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) panel model to estimate the impact of the of telecommunications and educational variables on economic growth. The evidence confirms the presence of a differential impact of telecommunications on economic growth related to educational levels.