Does broadband Internet access actually spur economic growth?

In this paper I attempt to answer a relatively straightforward question: does broadband Internet access spur economic growth? Here, broadband refers to any Internet connection that is “always on and faster than the traditional dial-up access.” [1], and economic growth refers to gross domestic product (GDP) of individual countries. Intuitively, it seems clear that access to broadband Internet should engender economic growth. For example, access to broadband allows individuals educate themselves (thereby contributing to a nation’s overall human capital stock), helps organizations streamline business procedures and cut costs, yields access to new buyers and sellers in remote markets, enables new business models (consider telemedicine), facilitates more efficient market prices by reducing information asymmetry, forms an important part of an overall business environment that is conducive to growth, and catalyzes the forming of organizations between individuals who normally wouldnt be connected. Indeed, the ICTD research community generally believes that broadband spurs economic growth [2]. In fact, several groups are leading major projects based on this assumption. Berkeley’s Tier group [3] is working on building cheaper, easier to deploy long-distance wifi technologies. University of California Santa Barbara has a group looking at satellite and cellular technologies for rural communities [4]. IIT Delhi in India is working on content distribution networks for rural areas in India [5], and New York University is working on maintenance challenges in rural broadband networks [6]. If their assumption is true, their results stand to directly impact global devel-