statistical significance for other measures of welfare, which is driven partly by a smaller sample size (Table 4, panel b).

The sample is likewise split by gender and age. The positive effects of 3G coverage on non-food consumption are particularly pronounced among man-headed households. Splitting the sample by age using age 50 as a threshold (roughly the median age of household heads) reveals that the positive welfare effects of 3G coverage are more evident among households headed by younger people.

A potential mechanism through which mobile broadband Internet translates into improvements in welfare may be the impact on labor outcomes. The expansion of digital infrastructure and access to the Internet may not only help the creation of jobs in the ICT sector, but also reduce transaction costs for people in finding jobs or productive inputs or improve labor productivity (World Bank 2016). The analysis has examined the relationship between 3G coverage and four different labor outcomes: (1) employment, (2) wage and salaried employment, (3) formal employment, and (4) earning per month or wage.<sup>20</sup> The effect of mobile broadband technologies on wage/salaried or formal employment is of particular interest because a shift away from informal, self-employment toward more productive wage/salaried or formal employment in private and public services is deemed a potential pathway to reducing poverty rates in Africa (World Bank 2016, 2019). To test this causal channel, equation 1 is estimated once again, using labor outcomes as the dependent variable.

The analysis shows that 3G coverage is positively correlated with wage/salaried employment, formal employment and earnings per month, although the effects on wage/salaried employment and earnings become insignificant with the additional set of controls, which implies that these relationships may be confounded by other demographic and geographical factors (Table 5). 3G coverage does not have a significant impact on overall employment. These findings are consistent with other studies (e.g., Bahia et al. 2020; Hjort and Poulsen 2019) showing similar results: that access to the Internet translates into increased employment in wage or higher-skilled jobs. Our finding draws attention to the potential role that digital technologies can play in improving labor outcomes – and particularly, employment in “better” jobs.

# **5. Conclusion**

Despite the potential for development, evidence on the effects of Internet access on household welfare remains scarce. Most studies on digital technologies focus on cellphone (2G) access, while the studies that look at broadband tend to focus on fixed rather than mobile broadband. Yet, it is through mobile broadband that most people in African countries use the Internet (ITU 2019).

This paper provides new evidence on the positive impacts of mobile broadband coverage on household welfare in Senegal. It uses rich data available from household consumption surveys to analyze the implications of different types of technologies for welfare in 2011–18. To accomplish this, the analysis integrates household locations with data from maps of the terrestrial backbone networks and 2G, 3G, and 4G coverage maps. This allows an examination of the impact of both fixed and

> 20 For this analysis, an employed individual is an individual of working age (15–64) who had worked at least one hour during the seven days previous to the interview. Wage and salaried employment includes those workers who work in a place that is not their own farm or in a business not run by their own household. Formal employment is defined as those workers whose employers or company holds a national identification number and accounting. Wage is derived based on the question in the 2017–18 ELEPS which asked how much a person earned in the last 12 months.

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