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The Role of ICT in Economic Development – A Partial Survey
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4 Empirical Evidence
Thus far, the discussion of ICTs’ effects on development has been couched in a priori
terms. There is, however, an increasing body of literature that examines the effect of these
technologies on country growth rates, firm productivity, the spreading of markets, welfare and
labor productivity.
20
While these papers usually focus on developed countries, the evidence they
provide may contribute to the debate regarding ICTs in developing countries. This evidence is
therefore reviewed below.
4.1 Macroeconomic Evidence
Macroeconomic studies that try to evaluate the benefits of information and
communication technologies (ICTs) relate measures of the availability of these technologies to
measures of national aggregate activity, such as GDP. Studies in this genre usually rely on panel
data (information from several countries over a certain time period) and utilize an empirical
framework motivated by a production function such as,
)
,
,
,
(
it
it
it
it
it
A
I
L
K
f
Y
=
(4)
where for country
i
and time period
t
,
Y
,
K
,
L
and
I
are GDP, capital, labor, and a measure
of ICT infrastructure, respectively, and
A
is an overall efficiency factor which captures the level
of technology. Differentiating (4), yields a growth-accounting equation
)
/
(
)
/
(
)
/
(
)
/
(
/
4
3
2
1
A
A
I
I
L
L
K
K
Y
Y
&
&
&
&
&
η
η
η
η
+
+
+
=
,
(5)
where
η
represents the income share of an input (elasticities in the regression context) and the
product
)
/
(
4
A
A
&
η
represents multifactor productivity (the productivity residual in a regression
context).
21
Empirical specifications of (4) and (5) may be used as a basis for analyzing the
effects of ICT on the level and growth of GDP, respectively.
20
In the previous section, it was pointed out that these technologies have the potential to improve the productivity
and performance of public-sector agencies. However, this aspect
is not discussed in much detail as the empirical evidence on this front is rather sparse, and what does exist is largely
anecdotal. A reading of some of the papers (e.g., Hanna, 1993; Kamel, 1998) that have tried to assess the effect of
ICTs on government performance indicates that the effects of these technologies are mixed. In some cases, the
introduction of ICTs may have even increased the incidence of corruption (Heeks, 1998a, 1998b).
21
This neoclassical growth-accounting framework is based on constant returns to scale in production, competitive
input markets and the absence of externalities.
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