• Corpus ID: 16555476

Does ICT Bene t the Poor ? Evidence from South Africa

@inproceedings{Klonner2008DoesIB,
  title={Does ICT Bene t the Poor ? Evidence from South Africa},
  author={Stefan Klonner and Patrick James Nolen},
  year={2008}
}

• Stefan Klonner, P. Nolen
• Published 2008
• Economics

We study the economic e¤ects of the roll-out of mobile phone network coverage in rural South Africa. We address identi…cation issues which arise from the fact that network roll-out cannot be viewed as an exogenous process to local economic development. We combine spatially coded data from South Africa’s leading network provider with annual labor force surveys. We use terrain properties to construct an instrumental variable that allows us to identify the causal e¤ect of network coverage on economic outcomes under plausible assumptions. We …nd substantial e¤ects of cell phone network roll-out on labor market outcomes with remarkable gender-speci…c di¤erences. Employment increases by 15 percentage points when a locality receives network coverage. A gender-di¤erentiated analysis shows that most of this e¤ect is due to increased employment by women. Household income increases in a pro-poor way when cellular infrastructure is provided. JEL Codes: O15, O22, J22