Does technology adoption matter for economic development? An empirical evidence for Latin American countries

Extraordinary spread of new information and communication (ICTs) technologies has been recognized worldwide. ICTs are broadly perceived as tools facilitating economic growth and development, especially in economically backward countries. They are relatively easy and cheap to adopt, require minimum skills for effective usage, bringing opportunities for disadvantaged societies. They enable education, knowledge dissemination and sharing, processing and storing all kinds of information. At a time, existence of extend causal relationships between technology diffusion and general economy performance is highly probable. The paper seeks for empirical evidence in existing quantitative links between process of information and communication technologies (ICTs) adoption and dynamics of economic growth and development in Latin American countries. Preliminary we consider ICTs diffusion patterns in Latin American countries, approximating the diffusion process by S-shaped curves and estimating essential parameters of the curves. Afterwards, adopting a bundle of statistical and econometrical tools we aim to detect: if there is any quantitative relationship between ICTs adoption dynamics and economic growth and development; and we wish to estimate to what extend ICTs contribute to economic growth and development. We hypothesize on existing statistically significant and strong links between the two issues. For the analytical purposes, we use panel data for Latin American economies, in the time framework 1990-2011. All necessary data are derived from World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Database 2012 (16th edition) and World Development Indicators 2012.