Does internet affect economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa?

The purpose of this study is to examine the long-run and short-run relationship between internet usage and economic growth for 42 sub-Saharan African countries, with the help of panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model for the period 1998 to 2014. The ARDL bounds test results indicate that the internet usage and economic growth are cointegrated, and share a long-run relationship. The results show that the internet usage has a positive and significant impact on the economic growth in the long-run. However, the relevant short-run parameter is negative. Our findings have important implications for formulating the internet and economic growth policies in sub-Saharan African countries.