Abstract

Achieving sustainable economic development is one of humanity’s greatest challenges, and, in this regard, the United Nations has promoted a line of research based on sustainable economic development. In view of this, our study focused on the sustainable economic development of nations, specifically, development through the deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Academic researchers recognize the importance of ICT for economic and sustainable development, but there is controversy in the literature regarding two opposing points of view. First, there is a view that advances in ICT support Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, while, on the other hand, the view is that there is no relationship between these two factors. In view of this, we conducted a study where the objective was to determine whether investing in ICT contributes to sustainable economic development (measured by the GDP per capita) of European Union countries. We used Eurostat data and applied the partial least-squares (PLS) method to address the study. This approach allowed us to analyze European Union countries from 2014 to 2017, using fairly rigorous data. The most outstanding result was that ICT accounted for most of the explained variance in GDP per capita (GDPpp), and, specifically, the most representative indicator was “digital public services.” Therefore, we concluded that investing in the deployment of ICT supports the sustainable economic development of European Union countries. These countries should focus on investing in improved connectivity in areas with poor communications, as well as in training area inhabitants in the use and development of ICT to obtain greater development using these tools and technologies.

Highlights

  • Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are essential for reducing poverty, improving health and education services, and creating income sources for the most disadvantaged

  • If we focus on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, we must comment that the existing literature has identified a link between the GDPpp and ICT [15,16,17]

  • We find the GDP per capita to be an indicator of Sustainable Development, belonging to the Economic Activity sub-theme, which falls within the Economic Structure Theme [13,14] (p. 15), (p. 223) and allows us to focus our research on the development of this indicator

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Summary

Introduction

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are essential for reducing poverty, improving health and education services, and creating income sources for the most disadvantaged. Given the research problem posed by the lack of consensus in the literature regarding the impact of ICT on economic growth [27], and the need for sustainable economic development over time, we consider it appropriate to ask the following research question: Does the deployment of ICT positively influence the economic development of countries through GDP growth per capita? It consists of a large number of indicators, so it is a means to verify the possible existence of the effect of ICT on economic growth, but it makes it possible to arrange the group of ICT indicators that contribute most to the economic development of nations This allowed us to predict whether the five constructs analyzed provide a positive variance, which is the most outstanding result. We will present the theoretical framework, the empirical framework, the results, a discussion of the results, and, lastly, the conclusions, limitations, and future lines of research

Theoretical Framework
ICT and Sustainable Environment
ICT and the Environment
Growth Theories and ICT
Empirical Framework
Discussion
Conclusions
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