Mobile Phones and Economic Development in Rural Peru

We estimate the effects of mobile phone coverage on different measures of economic development. We exploit the timing of mobile coverage at the village level merging it with a village-level panel dataset for rural Peru. The main findings suggest that mobile phone expansion has increased household re...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Beuermann, Diether W., McKelvey, Christopher, Vakis, Renos
Format: Journal Article
Language:en_US
Published: Taylor and Francis 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10986/13369
Description
Summary:We estimate the effects of mobile phone coverage on different measures of economic development. We exploit the timing of mobile coverage at the village level merging it with a village-level panel dataset for rural Peru. The main findings suggest that mobile phone expansion has increased household real consumption by 11 per cent, reduced poverty incidence by 8 percentage points and decreased extreme poverty by 5.4 percentage points. Moreover, those benefits appear to be shared by all covered households regardless of mobile ownership.