Measuring Connectivity: A Call to Measure Internet Development with Open, Timely, and Relevant Data

Digital technology and international trade: Is it the quantity of subscriptions or the quality of data speed that matters?

“…While our dataset surely does not resolve this problem once and for all (as it comes with several caveats discussed above), our results show that technological progress over recent decades has made it is necessary to do this extra step and to account for both, quantity and quality. In this sense our results are a concrete case in point of the growing argument that digital connectivity metrics have to go beyond the accounting of technological devices (Zwart et al, 2015). While this study tested the differentiated effects of both ICT quantity and quality on international trade, we expect many interesting findings to be discovered once more fine-grained metrics of connectivity are applied to other aspects of socio-economic, cultural and political development (including latency, throughput, reliability, etc).…”

“…The methodological shortfall is the lack of consideration of the multilateral resistance terms, which "capture the fact that bilateral trade flows do not only depend on bilateral trade barriers but also on trade barriers across all trading partners" (Behrens et al, 2012, p. 773). The main shortcoming in terms of empirical evidence is that the independent variable used to represent the digital capacity does not directly represent the digital communicational capacity (Zwart et al, 2015). It is standard in the literature to consider the number of ICT subscriptions as a representation of the digital communication capacity (mainly drawing from the administrative registers of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU; 2014)), including the number of personal computers, phone lines and Internet users (Vemuri and Siddiqi, 2009;Ahmad et al, 2011;Clarke and Wallsten, 2006); the number of broadband subscriptions (e.g.…”