Economic growth and the development of telecommunications infrastructure in the G-20 countries: A panel-VAR approach

This paper examines the linkages between the development of telecommunications infrastructure (DTI), economic growth, and four key indicators of operation of a modern economy: gross capital formation, foreign direct investment inflows, urbanization rates, and trade openness. By studying the G-20 countries over the period 1991-2012 and employing a panel vector auto-regressive model for detecting Granger causality, we find a network of long-run causal connections between these variables, including bidirectional causality between DTI and economic growth. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.