A study on the macroeconomic and financial determinants of telecommunication infrastructure: Evidence from Turkiye

This paper investigates the economic and financial determinants of Turkiye's telecommunication infrastructure from 1970 to 2022. To analyze the impact of trade openness, gross domestic product, and foreign direct investments on telecom infrastructure, we employ the Maki cointegration test proposed by Maki (2012) [10], which accounts for multiple endogenous structural changes without requiring the number of these changes to be determined a priori. Following the finding of a long-run relationship between the variables, to assess the effect of the regressors on the telecommunication infrastructure, we estimate the long-run relationship using the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS). The findings of the FMOLS model show that all the coefficients are statistically significant and positive, indicating that all the considered variables have an increasing effect on telecommunication infrastructure. Accordingly, a 1 % increase in trade openness, foreign direct investments, and gross domestic product is associated with an average change of 0.942 %, 0.301 %, and 0.911 %, respectively, in telecommunication infrastructure. Since the significance, magnitude, and sign of the coefficients may change over time, we also estimate the long-run coefficients in a time-varying form. Our findings indicate that while foreign direct investment and gross domestic product have a positive coefficient in most of the sample period, trade openness is insignificant in the majority.