Internet Access, Spillover and Regional Development in China

Abstract

As Internet access grows at different rates across regions, the Internet has had variable effects on regional economies through agglomeration and spillover effects. This paper uses province-level panel data from 2000 to 2013 to study inequality in Internet access, its spatial effect on regional economies in China and the channels through which the spillover effects are most evident. We find that the Internet has dispersed quickly from core cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, to coastal provinces; and has had increasingly significant effects on neighboring regions. However, the Internet speed is still comparatively low outside the core cities. We then use endogenous growth models to quantify the effect of Internet access on regional economies. Our results show that, while Internet dispersion is positively associated with economic growth, the spillover effect varies significantly by region and is more pronounced in developed regions. So is the effect of the science and technology environment. Developed regions have benefited the most in the process. The three channels of spillover are listed here in order of relative significance: economy, proximity and urbanization. The spillover effect of the Internet may lead to the divergence of regional economies, working against the national goal of reducing regional inequality.

Measuring the concentration of information and communication technology infrastructure in Australia: Do affordability and remoteness matter?

“…Firstly, to yield meaningful results, the construction and reporting of a concentration measure should be conducted at the most disaggregated geographical level. Many studies are conducted to measure the concentration of ICT up to a considerable level of disaggregated geographical units in the context of USA, Brazil and China [12,16,42]. For the current study, the construction of the ICT CI at the SA4 geographical levels is impossible due to the terms and conditions of using the HILDA Restricted Release database.…”

Internet penetration and consumption inequality in China

“…For example, the coastal provinces have high internet penetration rates, while the rates of the central and western provinces are lower than the national average. Besides, the rural areas have less access to the internet and slower diffusion rates (Xia & Lu, 2008;Lin et al, 2017).…”

“…The digital divide has been identified in various dimensions such as among countries, regions, and sociodemographic (race, age, education, income, etc. ) groups (Song, 2008;Xia & Lu, 2008;Lin et al, 2017;Hwang & Nam, 2017). Geographically, technologies like the internet are invented and diffused from the large metropolitan areas with dominant shares of telecommunication infrastructure, and will reinforce these centralizing tendencies (Hwang, 2004).…”

From Digital Divide to Social Inclusion: A Tale of Mobile Platform Empowerment in Rural Areas

“…Low-educated, poorly literate rural residents with little experience in using ICTs are easily marginalized [5,6,31,32]. The digital outcome divide is the inequality of outcomes of using IT, such as the differences in economic gains, learning performances, regional development and other benefits [3,4,33]. Most digital divide studies have focused on the digital access divide but there have been few studies on the digital capability divide and the digital outcome divide [4].…”