Economic growth and broadband access: The European urban-rural digital divide

This paper estimates the regional effects of high-speed broadband coverage on economic growth in a panel of 1348 regions across all European Union Member States between 2011 and 2018. We distinguish between different connectivity speed levels by aggregating the available regional data across all existing broadband technologies, and investigate how regional differences in the contribution of broadband coverage to real economic growth can quantitatively explain the persistence of the European urban-rural digital divide. In order to make our results robust to endogeneity and disaggregated data availability issues, we employ a bootstrap-based bias correction for the dynamic fixed effects estimator. We find that expansions in the provision of lower-speed broadband access accelerated annual per capita growth in both urban and rural regions through diminishing returns to scale, but that the effects were weaker in those regions characterized by larger ruralization. High-speed broadband coverage, on the contrary, could only be significantly related to rural economic growth and had no impact within their urban coun-terparts. We find evidence that the costs of these high-speed rural connectivity expansions had not yet been offset, but that they exhibit increasing returns to scale with cut-off levels nearing full coverage. These results indicate that the high-speed digital expansion of rural Europe is a po-tential gamechanger for further rural development policies through its role as a general-purpose infrastructure, and consequently argue in favour of increased efforts to close the urban-rural digital gap.

Automated summary

This study investigates the regional effects of high-speed broadband coverage on economic growth in European Union Member States from 2011 to 2018. The research finds that expansions in lower-speed broadband access contribute to per capita growth in both urban and rural regions, but the impact is weaker in regions with higher ruralization. On the other hand, high-speed broadband coverage is significantly related to rural economic growth but has no impact on urban regions. The results suggest that strengthening rural high-speed digital expansion can be a game-changer for rural development and advocate for closing the urban-rural digital gap.