Policy Reform Economic Growth And The Digital Divide

The digital divide reflects a gap in telecom access, not lower propensity to use the internet in poor countries. Promoting access for poor households will help, but pro-competitive policy holds the key to rapid progress in narrowing the divide.

The digital divide reflects a gap in telecom access, not lower propensity to use the Internet in poor countries. Promoting access for poor households will help, but pro-competitive policy holds the key to rapid progress in narrowing the divide.Rapid growth of Internet use in high-income economies has raised the specter of a digital divide that will marginalize developing countries because they can neither afford Internet access nor use it effectively when it is available.Using a new cross-country data set, Dasgupta, Lall, and Wheeler investigate two proximate determinants of the digital divide: Internet intensity (Internet subscriptions per telephone mainline) and access to telecom services. Surprisingly, they find no gap in Internet intensity.When differences in urbanization and competition policy are controlled for, low-income countries have intensities as high as those of industrial countries. While income does not seem to matter in this context, competition policy matters a great deal. Low-income countries with high World Bank ratings for competition policy have significantly higher Internet intensities.The authors' finding on Internet intensity implies that the digital divide is not really new, but reflects a persistent gap in the availability of mainline telephone services. After identifying mobile telephones as a promising new platform for Internet access, they use panel data to study the determinants of mobile telephone diffusion during the past decade. Their results show that income explains part of the diffusion lag for poor countries, but they also highlight the critical role of policy. Developing countries whose policies promote economic growth and private sector competition have experienced much more rapid diffusion of mobile telephone services.Simulations based on the econometric results suggest that feasible reforms could sharply narrow the digital divide during the next decade for many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The authors' review of the literature also suggests that direct access promotion would yield substantial benefits for poor households and that cost-effective intervention strategies are now available.This paper - a product of Infrastructure and Environment, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to identify effective policies for narrowing the digital divide.

Digital technologies are spreading rapidly, but digital dividends--the broader benefits of faster growth, more jobs, and better services--are not. If more than 40 percent of adults in East Africa pay their utility bills using a mobile phone, why can’t others around the world do the same? If 8 million entrepreneurs in China--one third of them women--can use an e-commerce platform to export goods to 120 countries, why can’t entrepreneurs elsewhere achieve the same global reach? And if India can provide unique digital identification to 1 billion people in five years, and thereby reduce corruption by billions of dollars, why can’t other countries replicate its success? Indeed, what’s holding back countries from realizing the profound and transformational effects that digital technologies are supposed to deliver? Two main reasons. First, nearly 60 percent of the world’s population are still offline and can’t participate in the digital economy in any meaningful way. Second, and more important, the benefits of digital technologies can be offset by growing risks. Startups can disrupt incumbents, but not when vested interests and regulatory uncertainty obstruct competition and the entry of new firms. Employment opportunities may be greater, but not when the labor market is polarized. The internet can be a platform for universal empowerment, but not when it becomes a tool for state control and elite capture. The World Development Report 2016 shows that while the digital revolution has forged ahead, its 'analog complements'--the regulations that promote entry and competition, the skills that enable workers to access and then leverage the new economy, and the institutions that are accountable to citizens--have not kept pace. And when these analog complements to digital investments are absent, the development impact can be disappointing. What, then, should countries do? They should formulate digital development strategies that are much broader than current information and communication technology (ICT) strategies. They should create a policy and institutional environment for technology that fosters the greatest benefits. In short, they need to build a strong analog foundation to deliver digital dividends to everyone, everywhere.

Contrary to optimistic visions of a free internet for all, the problem of the ‘digital divide’ – the disparity between those with access to internet technology and those without – has persisted for close to twenty-five years. In this textbook, Jan van Dijk considers the state of digital inequality and what we can do to tackle it. Through an accessible framework based on empirical research, he explores the motivations and challenges of seeking access and the development of requisite digital skills. He addresses key questions such as: Does digital inequality reduce or reinforce existing, traditional inequalities? Does it create new, previously unknown social inequalities? While digital inequality affects all aspects of society and the problem is here to stay, Van Dijk outlines policies we can put in place to mitigate it. The Digital Divide is required reading for students and scholars of media, communication, sociology, and related disciplines, as well as for policymakers.

In this well researched book, the author explains the digital divide and its repercussions for developed and developing nations. In his view, the overzealous disciplining at the WTO-level of instruments affecting trade notwithstanding, developing countries still have important tools in their hands (intellectual property protection, competition policies, tax regimes) that can help them attract foreign direct investment, a crucial ingredient in reducing the current divide. Borrowing from the institutions that we have seen developed in international economic relations is highly recommended as well. In short, whether the divide will continue to persist or, conversely, whether it will gradually become a historical feature of international relations critically depends on the political will on both sides (of the divide). The author makes a persuasive argument to support his thesis, empirically researched and with strong foundations in theory. Petros C. Mavroidis, Columbia Law School, US and University of Neuch'tel, Switzerland This path-breaking book focuses on the WTO, e-commerce and information communications technologies. It sheds light on how international economic law can be used as a tool in the application of technological processes to facilitate development in developing countries. Rohan Kariyawasam begins by looking predominantly at the rise of international digital networks. He offers an introduction to the networks used in the delivery of electronic products and network-based transactions, and the application of WTO law to the sector. He then suggests how developing countries can use economic law and technology to tap digital markets in the developed world. The book also argues that the advance of basic living standards in some developing countries can be achieved through technological processes, but that this cannot happen without such states paying greater attention to the enforcement of economic, social and cultural rights at home. Picking up the property rights debate (including through bilateral trade), the author argues that ensuring beneficial technology transfer will require balancing foreign investor rights to protect intellectual property. It will also involve restrictions imposed by competition law and WTO surveillance to check the possible misuse of market power by multinational companies. The proposed mixture of measures should, he argues, provide incentives for Foreign Direct Investment. Providing a thorough review of the application of WTO law to the telecommunications sector and the regulation of international digital networks, this book will be of great interest to postgraduate students in international economic law and international development law, as well as those interested in human rights law and technology. It will also appeal to government regulators, NGOs and technologists interested in ICTs and development.

This book analyzes extensive data on the world’s rapidly changing and growing access to, use and geographies of information and communications technologies. It studies not only the spatial differences in technology usage worldwide, but also examines digital differences in the major world nations of China, India, the United States and Japan at the state and provincial levels. At the global level, factors such as education, innovation, judicial independence and investment are important to explaining differences in the adoption and use of technology. The country studies corroborate consistent determinants for technology usage for education, urban location, economic prosperity, and infrastructure, but also reveal unique determinants, such as social capital in the United States and India, exports in China and working age population and patents in Japan. Spatial patterns are revealed that indicate clusters of high and low technology use for various nations around the world, the countries of Africa and for individual states/provinces within nations. Based on theory, novel findings and phenomena that have remained largely unreported, the book considers the future of the worldwide digital divides, the policy role of governments and the challenges of leadership.

Addressing the big questions about how technological change is transforming economies and societies Rapid technological change—likely to accelerate as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic—is reshaping economies and how they grow. But change also causes disruption, creates winners and losers, and produces social stress. This book examines the challenges of digital transformation and suggests how creative policies can make it more productive and inclusive. Shifting Paradigms is the second book on technological change produced by a joint research project of the Brookings Institution and the Korea Development Institute. Contributors are experts from the United States, Europe, and Korea. The first volume, Growth in a Time of Change, was published by Brookings in February 2020. The book's underlying thesis is that the future is arriving faster than expected. Long-accepted paradigms about economic growth are changing as digital technologies transform markets and nearly every aspect of business and work. Change will only intensify with advances in artificial intelligence and other innovations. Investors, business leaders, workers, and public officials face many questions. Is rising market concentration inevitable with the new technologies or can their benefits be more widely shared? How can the promise of FinTech be captured while managing risks? Should workers fear the new automation? Are technology-driven shifts in business and work causing income inequality to rise? How should public policy respond? Shifting Paradigms addresses these questions in an engaging manner for anyone interested in understanding how the economic and social agenda is being transformed by today's winds of change.

Most discussions of the digital divide treat it as a "North-South" issue, but the conventional dichotomy doesn't apply to cell phones in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although almost all Sub-Saharan countries are poor by international standards, they exhibit great disparities in coverage by cell telephone systems. Buys, Dasgupta, Thomas and Wheeler investigate the determinants of these disparities with a spatially-disaggregated model that employs locational information for cell-phone towers across over 990,000 4.6-km grid squares in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using probit techniques, a probability model with adjustments for spatial autocorrelation has been estimated that relates the likelihood of cell-tower location within a grid square to potential market size (proximate population); installation and maintenance cost factors related to accessibility (elevation, slope, distance from a main road, distance from the nearest large city); and national competition policy. Probit estimates indicate strong, significant results for the supply-demand variables, and very strong results for the competition policy index. Simulations based on the econometric results suggest that a generalized improvement in competition policy to a level that currently characterizes the best-performing states in Sub-Saharan Africa could lead to huge improvements in cell-phone area coverage for many states currently with poor policy performance, and an overall coverage increase of nearly 100 percent.