From the abstract: "We
examine a panel of over 100 countries in up to 4 five year periods and estimate
the effects of Internet use and access to broadband Internet
access on the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index. We find evidence that
the net effect of Internet access on institutional quality is
non-linear. It is positive at low initial levels of institutional quality and
turns negative at higher levels. We hypothesize that increased Internet
access affects institutions through three channels: (i) it may strengthen
institutions by solving coordination problems; (ii) it may increase the number
of countries that can be viewed as “neighbors”, thus increasing the potential
for institutional spillovers; (iii) increased Internet
access may increase emotional contagion and the demand for collective action.
We find that the effect of Internet use and access
on economic freedom is largely positive but contingent on the initial level of
economic freedom. Specifically, (i) and (ii) appear to dominate at lower
initial levels of economic freedom and for most of the countries in our sample.
However, at higher initial levels of freedom (iii) becomes relatively important;
for a few OECD countries in our sample, the total effect is negative." Read more
