Comments on: Teledensity and GDP Growth

By: Telecommunications and Rural India

Telecommunications and Rural India — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:10:37 +0000

[...] post: Teledensity and GDP Growth (March [...]

By: leena

leena — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:26:59 +0000

i am doing a study on FDI in india during the post reforms period. can anybody pls help me with inputs?

what do u think about inflow of FDI and the telecom industry of india?

By: CA Sanjoy Banka

CA Sanjoy Banka — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 04:09:52 +0000

The planned teledensity for India is said to be 22% by 2007. In your estimate how much investment is needed to fund this expansion.

By: The Acorn » Friedmanspeak and the geopolitics of oil

The Acorn » Friedmanspeak and the geopolitics of oil — Mon, 08 May 2006 13:15:26 +0000

[...] er to point out that correlation is not quite the same as causation (see Atanu Dey’s post on this). He simply assumes that rising oil prices cause erosion of freedoms i [...]

By: Brough Turner

Brough Turner — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 13:28:26 +0000

In the case of teledensity and GDP growth, there's actually been quite a bit of work by economists trying to tease out what is causation and what is merely correlation. Yes, it's a difficult problem. On the other hand, there are decades of data across more than 100 countries -- countries which introduced different political, legal and economic regimes at different points in time. So it turns out there is a basis on which to attempt to determine the impact of telecom and other kinds of infrastructure investments and, over the past decade or so, multiple economists have published on this subject. A 1999 World Bank policy research working paper entitled Infrastructure's Contribution to Aggregate Output, by David Canning examines the contributions of different factors of production to aggregate output looking at 57 countries over the period 1960-1990. As I commented here last August, Canning found a large productivity benefit to investment in telecom -- larger than investments in roads, electricity or even education! Canning's work was on pre-mobile phone data. More recently, Leonard Waverman, Meloria Meschi, Melvyn Fuss in their paper, The impact of telecoms on economic growth in developing countries, examine 38 developing countries for which full data was available for the period 1996-2003. The short summary, "There are increasing returns to the endowment of telecoms capital (as measured by the telecoms penetration rate)." A second post in my blog last October has the full references as well as pointers to popularizations of this academic work published in The Economist (UK, subscription required), related material on the Vodafone website, and regulatory policy work by Wallenstien. To restate the concluding words of my October post, none of this is to downplay the developing world's need for clean water, public health initiatives and access to medical care, but if there is one area where capital investment provides out-sized returns for individuals and nations, it's mobile telecom. And this is one area where developing nations can easily attract outside capital investment with regulatory policies that favor open access, competition and foreign investment.

By: Rajan

Rajan — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 03:03:52 +0000

How does one go about finding if there is a causation or not if there is a correlation. Atanu's response: The short answer is that the correlation is determined from experimental data which is gathered by carefully eliminating confounding effects and by discarding any hidden variables.