Digitalization, education and economic growth: A comparative analysis of Middle East and OECD countries

This paper aims to examine the contribution of ICT and education to economic growth concerning the Middle East countries in comparison with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economies. The main reason why the most and the least developed countries are compared regarding the measurement of the effects of ICT and education, is to get an insight into whether such effects depend on the levels of development of the country. Herein, a panel dataset is employed consisting of 18 years, from 2000 to 2017, for 10 Middle Eastern and 24 OECD countries, and the OLS fixed-effect and GMM methods are applied. The results show that ICT is positively associated with economic growth in both groups of countries. The effect of internet users is minimal for the Middle East compared to OECD countries where as the impact of mobile subscription is observed to be higher in the Middle East compared to the OECD counterpart. With respect to policy implications, this study recommends that the Middle East governments should invest more in ICT along with other infrastructures, so as to benefit from ICT and to realize significant economic growth.