Is ICT a new essential for national economic growth in an information society?

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Panel data analysis National ICT capacity National economic development National transparency This paper attempts to empirically verify the theoretical assumption that ICT factors affect national economic development. To this end, this study will use a research model to examine the relationship between ICT and development through statistical evidence. IT infrastructure, IT competence, IT investment and IT trade size will be selected as variables reflecting ICT factors since these are widely used by the balance model of supply and demand. Also, this paper will employ several socioeconomic factors such as population size, consumer inflation, national corruption and education as control variables. A panel data analysis was used to statistically verify the impact of national ICT capability on a country's development. Furthermore, this paper tried to find an intervening variable between ICT and national development such as national corruption, consumer inflation and national education that have been highlighted as important elements of national development from political and social perspectives , and improved explanatory power of the analysis model. This result indicates that these variables mediate ICT capacity's effects on each surveyed nation's economic growth. This study verified statistic relevance for the effects that ICT capacity has on economic development. Many researchers highlight ICT's role in and impact on the progress of human history after the Industrial Revolution (Northrop, 2000). The ITU (2010) defines ICT as an efficiency parameter of technological advance that revolutionizes production, logistics process and decision making. The effects of the information revolution are reaching a whole range of daily activities, bringing changes in the role and scope that the government, business and individuals play (Jin, 2008). A diversity of both optimistic and pessimistic views co-exists on the ICT-led paradigm shift in human history. 1 Thus this issue has been subject to intense controversies in academia since 2000. Certain papers made a negative pitch of the digital divide and internet abuse or misuse, whereas other papers shed a positive light on ICT-initiated national development and its subsequent improvement in quality of life In this regard, other economists have debated whether ICT is a new production value system that can drive national development. Under this circumstance, ICT has become a subject of discussion on how it influences an economy and attests to the need for empirical studies on the effectiveness of the IT revolution since the 1980s. Certain studies …