Economywide and Sectoral Impacts on Workers of Brazil’s Internet Rollout
This paper is a study of the effect of Brazil's staggered Internet rollout between 2000 and 2014 on municipality employment and wages. The study uses a new, annual data set on Internet availability from the Brazil school census, with the assum...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/973891493212601857/Economywide-and-sectoral-impacts-on-workers-of-Brazil-s-internet-rollout http://hdl.handle.net/10986/26480 |
| Summary: | This paper is a study of the effect of
Brazil's staggered Internet rollout between 2000 and
2014 on municipality employment and wages. The study uses a
new, annual data set on Internet availability from the
Brazil school census, with the assumption that the share of
schools that have Internet access in each municipality
reflects the general accessibility of Internet connections.
These data are combined with Brazil's rich, matched
employer-employee survey, which contains annual occupation
and wage earnings information for all formally-employed
workers in Brazil across all sectors, including primary,
secondary, and tertiary industry groups. Contemporaneous and
lagged effects are considered. The analysis finds that
increased Internet access has no statistically significant
net effect on aggregate employment, and has a negative
effect on average wages, with a reduction in measures of
wage dispersion. Brazil’s Internet rollout results in
employment shifts from sectors with more limited expansion
opportunities (wholesale and retail trade, public
administration, and largely publicly-owned utilities, which
jointly comprise almost half of the formal workforce in
2010) to sectors with more output expansion opportunities.
The employment effects are positive and most pronounced in
the manufacturing, transport and storage, finance and
insurance, and hospitality industry groups. In the
manufacturing sector, Internet access induces positive
employment and wage effects in medium- and high-skill occupations. |
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