Broadband access in the EU: An assessment of future economic benefits

H. Gruber, J. Hätönen and Pantelis Koutroumpis

24th European Regional ITS Conference, Florence 2013 from International Telecommunications Society (ITS)

Abstract: This paper evaluates the net benefits of the implementation of the broadband infrastructure deployment targets by 2020 as entailed by the Digital Agenda for Europe Initiative set forth by the European Commission. We estimate the returns from broadband infrastructure for the period 2005-2011, differentiating the impact of broadband by levels of adoption and speed while accounting for reverse causality and extensive heterogeneity. We find that in the base case scenario the overall benefits outweigh the costs by 32% for the entire European Union. We further extrapolate the returns by country under different scenarios of implementation. In most cases the benefits are substantially well above the costs. The findings lead to policy recommendations related to the role of public support for the generalized build out of broadband infrastructure.

Keywords: broadband networks; economic impact; Digital Agenda (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O33 O38 O52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-ict and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/88492/1/773374760.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:itse13:88492

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 24th European Regional ITS Conference, Florence 2013 from International Telecommunications Society (ITS)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().