Knowledge-Based Economic Development: Mass Media and the Weightless Economy

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of mass media and information and communications technologies (ICT) as knowledge-based infrastructures on economic development. The results suggest that both mass media and ICT penetration are negatively associated with corruption. This result holds across both the entire sample (of both developed and developing countries), and only for developing countries. The same result is also obtained for the effects of ICT and mass media on economic inequality. However, ICT reveals itself inequality increasing for the developing country sample but inequality decreasing for the entire sample. Finally, lower poverty is robustly associated with higher media (newspaper circulation) penetration.

JEL Classification: D30, D80, O1, O57