Determinants of a Digital Divide in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Spatial Econometric Analysis of Cell Phone Coverage

By Pieter Buys, Susmita Dasgupta, Timothy S. Thomas, David Wheeler. 2008

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary This paper investigates the determinants of disparities in coverage by cell telephone systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. It uses a spatially disaggregated probit for over 990,000 grid cells with adjustments for spatial autocorrelation. Determinants include potential market size (population); cost factors related to accessibility (elevation, slope, distance from a main road, and distance from the nearest large city); and competition policy. Estimates indicate significant results for the supply-demand variables, and very strong results for the competition policy index. Simulations suggest that a generalized improvement in competition policy could lead to huge improvements in cell phone area coverage, and to an overall coverage increase of nearly 100%.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/520996cd6a5f3667781c9571680e57c05fc97ad3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Anthony Stefanidis
2. Jacek R. Radzikowski
3. Andrew T. Crooks

In Media Technology

1. Anthony Stefanidis
2. Jacek R. Radzikowski
3. Andrew T. Crooks

Citations in the corpus

• Harvesting ambient geospatial information from social media feeds (2011, background): “…is dependent on increased access to the Internet, digital divide issues (the ‘haves’ and ‘have not’) still remain important, leading for example, to variations in developed versus less-developed countries access to information therefore contribution (see: Longley et al. 2006; Buys et al. 2009).”
• Mobile Phone Coverage and Producer Markets: Evidence from West Africa (2014, unknown): “To verify these claims, we regress a binary variable for mobile phone coverage in location j at time t on j ’s urban status, latitude and longitude, elevation, slope, and road quality (Buys et al. 2009; Batzilis et al. 2010).”