Mobile Internet and regional development in China

Does the spread of mobile Internet promote regional development and reduce poverty? This important question is closely related to the topic of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and economic development, which has been discussed for a long time (Heeks, 2010; World Bank, 2016). Researchers have shown evidence that Internet connectivity and the use of mobile phones can reduce transaction cost, increase market efficiency, expand educational opportunities, and promote innovation (Aker and Mbiti, 2010; Guerrero, 2015; Litan and Rivlin, 2001). Yet little empirical works have been done to analyze the economical impacts of mobile Internet due to the scarcity of micro-level data, despite that smart-phone and mobile Internet are becoming an inseparable part of people’s daily lives. Here, we propose using a novel data source to map county-level mobile Internet coverage in China and analyze its relationship with socio-economical indicators. First, we extracted the most visited county as a user’s ‘‘home county’’ via Baidu’s geo-positioning data, which covers nearly 80% of the total mobile Internet users in China. We summed up the number of users within the whole country and scaled the total number up to 500 million—the total number of mobile Internet subscribers in China at the end of 2013 (CNNIC, 2016). We then divided the mobile Internet users of each county by its corresponding population derived from statistic yearbooks, constructing the mobile Internet coverage indicator at county-level. Second, we collected socio-economical data (e.g. gross regional product (GRP), national poverty counties, urbanization rate, and education year) from sixth population census and local governments’ reports, and combined them at county-level for comparison. Figure 1 maps the mobile Internet coverage and national poverty counties (released by the Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development in 2012). We find that the area of higher mobile Internet coverage (brighter) is also the area where the economy is more developed, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, and Zhejiang; and most of the national poverty counties (in orange) are of lower mobile Internet coverage (darker), which looks like ‘‘digital black holes.’’ For example, there are 73 national poverty counties in Yunnan province (Figure 1(d)), ranking the lowest among all provinces. Meanwhile, the mobile Internet coverage of Yunnan is 22.9%, ranking the second lowest.