A Global Perspective of the Impact of ICTs on Economic Growth and Democratic Freedom

摘要

In recent years, we have observed a growing number of socio-political movements across the globe using tools and services provided by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to participate in democratic discourse and mobilization. The increased level of citizens’ participation in communication discourse using social networking sites and blogs is an indication of the role of ICT tools and services, particularly the Internet, in today’s communication landscape. This empirical study uses archival data for 146 countries across the globe for the period 1996-2010 to investigate the impact of ICT expansion and other determinant parameters such as education, the rule of law, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and institutional resistance on democratic freedoms on a global scale. Some of the important findings of this study reveal that ICT positively influences democratic freedoms across the globe and that while the global digital divide in basic telecom infrastructure has decreased during the last 15 years, the gap has shifted significantly. The digital gap is greater between the least developed nations and the most developed countries in terms of broadband technologies.