Advancement of indices assessing a nation׳s telecommunications development status: A PLS structural equation analysis of over 100 countries

Torsten J. Gerpott and Nima Ahmadi

Telecommunications Policy, 2015, vol. 39, issue 2, 93-111

Abstract: The literature has already presented quite a number of composite metrics seeking to quantify the achievement level of countries with regard to their telecommunication infrastructures and their use by end customers. However, prior measures leave room for extensions. Therefore, this paper introduces a new second-order overall index assessing the availability, adoption and usage intensity of telecommunication networks and services at the country level. The proposed Telecommunications Development Index (TDI) integrates 11 indicators, which are grouped into three first-level subindices labeled Supply, Adoption and Usage. Indicator and subindex weights used in combining them into higher-order measures are computed drawing on Partial Least Squares (PLS) structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques. The modeling rests on the assumption that TDI weights should be outcome-specific and thus constructed in a way that maximizes the indicators׳ and subindices׳ capability, respectively to predict socially desirable national performance criteria such as per capita gross domestic product (GDP) change or a country׳s Human Development Index (HDI) value. Based on data from 111 countries, this approach was used to calculate weights of the indicators and subindices merged into a total TDI predicting either GDP per capita change or a country׳s HDI. In both TDI variants the Adoption subindex variable fixed broadband subscriptions per household and the Supply subindex variable international bandwidth capacity available per Internet user achieved the highest relative weights of all indicators in the prediction of the two studied social outcome criteria. The PLS SEM results were used to calculate scores of the two TDI variations for each of the sample countries. TDI-based rankings of the countries were compared with a ranking derived from the Information and Communication Technologies Development Index of the International Telecommunication Union.

Keywords: Adoption; Composite indices; Country ranking; ITU data base; Partial Least Squares structural equation modeling; Supply; Usage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308596114001876
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:telpol:v:39:y:2015:i:2:p:93-111

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/30471/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... /30471/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.telpol.2014.11.007

Access Statistics for this article

Telecommunications Policy is currently edited by Erik Bohlin

More articles in Telecommunications Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().