Mobile Phone in Sub-Saharan Africa: Impact on Technological Innovation and Economic Development

Major African cities came recently in the age of digital communications, mainly through the uprising of mobile phone networks which have experienced an impressive growth throughout the continent. The development of the continent mobile telecommunication market is providing many advantages in the economic, social and human fields, changing rural and urban populations access to information in most of developing countries, including SubSaharan Africa countries. The telecommunications sector has then been coming to be a vital sector on the time of economic reforms that the African continent has recently experienced. The main objective of this paper is to study the effects of telecommunications infrastructure, particularly the mobile phone implementation on economic development and growth. A dynamic panel dataset using annual observations of 33 countries covering period from 1990 to 2012 is used to measure the causal relationship between mobile phone technology and economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa. We use a dynamic panel System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach, which shows that the implementation of mobile phone technology contributes in a major way to the economic development of the continent. It proves to be a crucial determinant, as our results indicate a significant and positive correlation between mobile phone and economic development in Africa, after controlling for a number of related factors. KeysWords: Mobile Phone, Telecommunication Infrastructure, Economic Development, SubSaharan Africa  Laboratoire d'Economie d'Orleans (LEO), CNRS -UMR 7322, F45067 University of Orleans, Rue de Blois, BP 26739 45067 Orleans Cedex 2, France, tel : +33 (0)2 38 41 70 37 / +33 (0)2 38 49 48 19, fax : +33 (0)2 38 41 73 80 / University of Gaston Berger, Saint-Louis, SENEGAL .Email: [email protected].