Publication: Mobile Phones and Economic Development in Rural Peru
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Date
2012-11-02
ISSN
0022-0388
Published
2012-11-02
Author(s)
Abstract
We estimate the effects of mobile phone coverage on different measures of economic development. We exploit the timing of mobile coverage at the village level merging it with a village-level panel dataset for rural Peru. The main findings suggest that mobile phone expansion has increased household real consumption by 11 per cent, reduced poverty incidence by 8 percentage points and decreased extreme poverty by 5.4 percentage points. Moreover, those benefits appear to be shared by all covered households regardless of mobile ownership.