محوریت برق به استفاده از ICT در کشورهای کم درآمد  The centrality of electricity to ICT use in low-income countries

1. Introduction Many believe that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have the potential to improve quality of life around the world. Recent times have seen the emergence of an entire body of scholarly literature devoted to defining, conceptualizing, debating, measuring, and addressing the use of ICTs in developing countries. Our contribution concerns an underemphasized factor impacting all technology use, particularly for less-developed locations: lack of electricity. Its presence is a prerequisite to ICT use, and its under-emphasis in the digital divide literature has significant consequences for the developing world: countless initiatives have failed to consider the ability to power the technology that is central to such development efforts (Hosman & Baikie, 2013). Hosman & Baikie, 2013). Our intention, therefore, is to foreground electricity as a fundamental consideration in ICT for development. We use an innovative approach for measuring countries’ electrical infrastructure using data on the distribution of night light as measured from space by satellite. This dataset provides both a measure of distribution (rather than quantity) of electricity used in developing countries, and includes off the grid power use in low-income countries where an electrical grid constitutes only a small proportion of the electric power available. We use country fixed effects to distinguish within-country drivers of Internet adoption from cross-country differences. We believe that these within-country differences are more important for short-run within-country policy considerations.Moreover, this is one of the first papers on this topic to use dynamic panel data analysis, which allows us to model the S-shaped curves and dynamic processes that characterize technology adoption. In addition, the use of newer data, 2000– 2010, offers novel insights into disparities in Internet adoption because it has been a period of change and divergence of Internet adoption in developing countries.