The effect of telecom density data on growth, efficiencies, and distributions in global economies

This paper presents data analysis for the global telecommunication industry from the modern points of view of growth, efficiency, and distribution. It demonstrates a direct effect of telecom variables on GDP per capita, which has been initiated in the literature, but was applied only to the teledensity data. Efficiency is a concern for the use of scarce resources as a means for growth, whether for developing or developed nations. We used the new Stochastic Frontier technology to assess how countries are measuring up to production efficiency standard. As for distribution, we appraise how the countries in the sample are faring in terms of the distribution of scarce telecom capital. Our significant statistical results points in the direction that telecom data does affect growth directly, that efficiency on the production side has room for improvement across both developing and developed nations, and that while the gap in inequality is closing for the telephone density, it is widening for the Internet and cellular densities.