Because of high user demand, mobile telephony penetration has surpassed fixed line penetration in much of the developing world. While growth is phenomenal, there is reason to believe that it is nonetheless tempered by corruption and poor governance. This paper is an attempt to measure the extent of said effect. The paper forms two separate models, a 93 country worldwide model and a 50 country, Africa specific model. The paper uses OLS regression to measure GDP per capita, urban population, and monthly cost of a mobile or mainline telephone against mobile penetration in both models. As a unique addition, measures of official corruption, government accountability, government stability, and the rule of law are also included as independent variables.
As expected, the paper finds a statistically significant and positive correlation between mobile penetration and corruption control in the world model. However, the same relationship is not statistically significant in the Africa model. Despite higher levels of perceived corruption, corruption is not a determinant of mobile penetration in Africa. The world model shows a positive and statistically significant relationship between other governance variables and mobile penetration. The Africa model mimics these results; an ambiguous relationship between the political stability and mobile penetration is the exception.
An alternative model is also developed to further explore the impact of information technology. The dependant and independent variables are reversed to determine if increased dissemination of information technologies mitigates the deleterious effects of corruption. Concerns regarding causality are tempered by lagging mobile, mainline and internet penetration. The paper finds a robust, positive relationship between reduced corruption and internet penetration and a strong, negative relationship between reduced corruption and mobile penetration. Similar regressions were run with other measures of governance. The results were not statistically significant.