Mobile Phones and Economic Development in Rural Peru |
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| Authors: | Diether W. Beuermann Christopher McKelvey Renos Vakis |
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| Affiliation: | 1. CENTRUM Católica, Graduate School of Business, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú dbeuermann@pucp.edu.pe;3. Department of Population Health Sciences , University of Wisconsin-Madison , USA;4. The World Bank , Washington , DC , USA |
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| 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. |
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