Knowledge-based economic development: mass media and the weightless economy

This paper examines the impact of mass media and information and commu- nications technologies (ICT) as knowledge-based infrastructures on economic development. The results suggest that both mass media and ICT penetra- tion are negatively associated with corruption. This result holds across both the entire sample (of both developed and developing countries), and only for developing countries. The same result is also obtained for the e¤ects of ICT and mass media on economic inequality,. However, ICT reveals itself inequal- ity increasing for the developing country sample but inequality decreasing for the entire sample. Finally, lower poverty is robustly associated with higher media (newspaper circulation) penetration.