phenomenon and study the real role of ICT in economic growth, we disaggregate the effects by technology, degree of development, and timing of adoption.

When addressing the impact of ICT adoption on economic growth, there appears to be a distinction in the literature between effects in developed versus developing countries. Dedrick et al. (2003), based on a review of 50 empirical studies, conclude that computer adoption has positive effects in the United States but mixed effects among developing countries. A possible explanation of this evidence could be that IT investment represents a significant share of the U.S. capital stock, which is not the case in the developing world. Niebel (2018) measures the impact of ICT on economic growth on a sample of 59 countries between 1995 and 2010. The results show a positive relationship between ICT and GDP growth. Despite that, the author does not find statistically significant differences in the impacts among developing, emerging, and developed countries. These results, however, might suffer from sample bias since data on ICT capital was mostly available in countries with large GDPs. An analysis including a larger group of countries (especially providing better coverage of smaller economies) would be needed to address this bias. Similarly, Stanley et al. (2018) analyze 58 empirical studies, and find positive and significant impacts of mobile and landline communication technologies on economic growth. Yet, the effects of mobile technologies are twice as large as those of landline. This could explain the technological leapfrogging in developing countries (particularly, in Sub-Saharan Africa) that have passed over landline infrastructure and jumped directly to mobile telecommunications (UNCTAD, 2018). Likewise, using different proxies of ICT infrastructures on economic growth in 28 countries of the European Union between 2000 and 2017, Toader et al. (2018) find that a 1 percent increase in the use of digital infrastructure would increase GDP per capita by between 0.08 percent, if the infrastructure is measured by fixed broadband subscriptions, and 0.4 percent, if it is measured by mobile phone subscriptions. On the other hand, Stanley et al. (2018), find little evidence supporting the positive impact of the internet and fixed broadband on economic growth. These results could be explained by the findings of Andrews et al. (2016) that suggest a recent slowdown in global productivity growth explained by productivity divergence between global frontier firms (“top 5% of firms in terms of labor productivity or multi-factor productivity”) and laggard firms. Therefore, the authors suggest analyzing the effects of technology on productivity and growth at different levels (global, country) and types of firms (global frontier and laggard firms).

Given the complexities and various nuances that lie at the nexus between ICT and the developing world, there are discrepancies in the literature about the intensity of the effects of the internet on economic growth. Bertschek et al. (2015) provide a review of empirical studies from the last decade on the effects of fixed broadband internet (e.g., networks and services) and economic growth, employment, and productivity. Overall, telecommunications and fixed broadband deployment have a significant positive impact on economic growth and productivity. However, the general conclusion seems to point at a disparity between the effects found in data before and after 2000. For instance, Choi and Yi (2009), use data reported for 207 countries between 1991 to 2000 from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI) to conclude that a 1 percentage point increase in the percentage of people with access to the internet results in an increase in the growth rate between 0.049 and 0.059 percentage points. However, using the same dataset but for a longer period, 1990-2015, Maurseth (2018) finds significant negative effects of the share of internet users on 6