The Effect of Content on Global Internet Adoption and the Global “Digital Divide”

Nicholas Economides () and V. Viard

No 10-24, Working Papers from NET Institute

Abstract: A country’s human capital and economic productivity increasingly depend on the Internet due to its expanding role in providing information and communications. This has prompted a search for ways to increase Internet adoption and narrow its disparity across countries – the global “digital divide.” Previous work has focused on demographic, economic, and infrastructure determinants of Internet access difficult to change in the short run. Internet content increases adoption and can be changed more quickly; however, the magnitude of its impact and therefore its effectiveness as a policy and strategy tool is previously unknown. Quantifying content’s role is challenging because of feedback (network effects) between content and adoption: more content stimulates adoption which in turn increases the incentive to create content. We develop a methodology to overcome this endogeneity problem. We find a statistically and economically significant effect, implying that policies promoting content creation can substantially increase adoption. Because it is ubiquitous, Internet content is also useful to affect social change across countries. Content has a greater effect on adoption in countries with more disparate languages, making it a useful tool to overcome linguistic isolation. Our results offer guidance for policy makers on country characteristics that influence adoption’s responsiveness to content and for Internet firms on where to expand internationally and how to quantify content investments.

Keywords: Internet; technology adoption; economic development; two-sided markets; network effects; technology diffusion; language; content (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L86 L96 O30 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2010-11, Revised 2013-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-ict and nep-net
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Forthcoming, Management Science

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.stern.nyu.edu/networks/The_Effect_of_Co ... nternet_Adoption.pdf (application/pdf)
no

Related works:
Journal Article: The Effect of Content on Global Internet Adoption and the Global “Digital Divide” (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:net:wpaper:1024

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from NET Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nicholas Economides ().