Telecommunication infrastructure and economic growth in Turkey

Abstract

The development of telecommunication infrastructure improves the knowledge capacity of the economy and promotes economic growth. In this setting, especially after 1980s, countries have enhanced their telecommunication investments and raise their telecommunication stocks. In Turkey, the investments in telecommunications -both public and private- have also increased and telecommunication stocks have scaled up in the past 20 years. In this study, we investigate the effect of telecommunication infrastructure on economic growth in Turkey. In this framework, we add telecommunication infrastructure as an input to the production function and estimate it via co-integration and vector error correction models. The results reveal that, telecommunication infrastructure has a positive and significant effect on GDP.