Mobile Phones and Economic Development in Rural Peru

We estimate the effects of mobile phone coverage on different measures of economic development. We exploit the timing of mobile coverage at the village level merging it with a village-level panel dataset for rural Peru. The main findings suggest that mobile phone expansion has increased household re...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of development studies 2012-11, Vol.48 (11), p.1617-1628
Main Authors: Beuermann, Diether W., McKelvey, Christopher, Vakis, Renos
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cell phones
Cellular telephones
Consumption
Development studies
Economic Development
Estimates
household wellbeing
Households
Mergers
Merging
mobile coverage
Mobile phones
Ownership
Peru
Poverty
Rural
Rural Areas
Rural Development
Time measurements
Towns
Villages
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Summary:We estimate the effects of mobile phone coverage on different measures of economic development. We exploit the timing of mobile coverage at the village level merging it with a village-level panel dataset for rural Peru. The main findings suggest that mobile phone expansion has increased household real consumption by 11 per cent, reduced poverty incidence by 8 percentage points and decreased extreme poverty by 5.4 percentage points. Moreover, those benefits appear to be shared by all covered households regardless of mobile ownership.
ISSN:0022-0388
1743-9140
DOI:10.1080/00220388.2012.709615