deviation above the national average. Table 4 shows the results for these comparisons.<sup>12</sup> Our results suggest that the mobility costs, particularly across industry and industry-region, tend to be smaller for workers with relatively more access to the Internet (table 4). This effect is not robust for mobility costs across regions when using only statistically significant estimates. Also, there are fewer statistically significant estimates for mobility costs across regions.<sup>13</sup> For example, on average sector mobility costs in Brazil would reduce from 1.1 to 0.97 times the average annual wage if access to the Internet for a worker in a given age _l_ in region-industry _k_ increases from lowto high-access status. A similar pattern is observed for Costa Rica, Honduras, Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay. The costs of moving to another industry-region in Brazil reduces from 1.3 to 1.02 times the average annual wage if workers move from low- to -high-access to Internet statuts. This pattern is followed by other countries (Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, and the Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela) in figure 5, except Honduras. Other exceptions, where the Internet effect seems to be negative are Chile, for sector, and Honduras, for region. But both countries also have significant coefficients that suggest positive effects of the Internet on industry or industry-region mobility costs.

The numbers of significant coefficients are smaller for regions, which may suggest that other factors (e.g. infrastructure, differences on amenities, or social network) might be more important as a driver of mobility costs across regions. These results also suggest that lack of access to information may play an important role in determining mobility costs across sectors. In addition to facilitate access to information on jobs’ opportunities in other sectors (and regions) access to the Internet can also reduce the costs of acquiring skills to perform in other sectors (e.g. online courses platform).

# **6 Concluding remarks**

This paper estimates mobility costs of workers across sectors and regions in a very large sample of developing countries. Our results suggest that on average sector mobility costs are larger than regional mobility costs. The average sector mobility cost is about 1.4 times the average real wage and is larger than the regional mobility costs (0.9 times the average real wage). The cost of moving both sector and region (1.8 the average real wage) is larger than the costs of moving only sector or only region, but smaller than the sum of these two costs. Our results also suggest that increasing access to the Internet can reduce mobility costs across sectors and sector-regions. Thus, facilitating access to information might be an important policy to be considered by governments aiming to reduce mobility costs.

> 12Table 1 provides the country and year of surveys included in the sample and estimations at the country-year level.

> 13The number of surveys available is significantly smaller for this section due to lack of data availability on Internet access. The analysis covers 67 surveys for 17 countries, most of them from Latin America and the Caribbean region.

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