Are Mobile Data Prices Correlated to Rates of GDP Growth?

Economists tend to agree that economic growth is “caused” by an increase of aggregate demand plus an increase in aggregate supply. 

Demand side drivers include consumer spending, investment, government spending, exports and imports. Supply side drivers include increased capital investment, an Increase in working population, an Increase in labor productivity, discovery of  new raw materials or technological improvements to improve the productivity of capital and labor.

It is that last item--technological improvements in computing or communications--that are believed to improve chances for economic growth. 

But economic and political stability also are important as they reduce uncertainty. Low inflation rates also encourages business investment, arguably because it reduces uncertainty. 

The point is that economic development is a complicated process. And the presence of many necessary preconditions does not always ensure success. What is necessary is not sufficient. 

For such reasons, metrics such as the cost of mobile data might, or might not, be helpful in explaining economic growth rates. If that were the case, the relationship between mobile data cost and economic growth would be linear. And that is not the case. 

Countries highest gross domestic product growth rates do not match up in a linear way with countries with the  lowest costs of mobile data per gigabyte of usage.  

source: Speedcheck

source: IMF 

We all seem to agree that quality communications are better than poor quality. We all act as though there is a correlation between quality communications and economic growth. To the extent that low prices per gigabyte of mobile data are any measure, a correlation with GDP growth is difficult to discern.