Bridging the Digital Divide: Analyzing the Impact of Internet Access on Economic Development Using World Bank Global Indicators

Noorul Sama Sahel

Co-Presenters: Maryam Ahmed

College: Hennings College of Science Mathematics and Technology

Major: BS.COMPSCI/DATSCI

Faculty Research Mentor: Huang, Ching-Yu  

Abstract:

Over the past three decades, technological advancement has played a significant role in driving global economic growth. Despite this progress, access to the internet remains uneven across different regions of the world, contributing to what is widely known as the digital divide. This study examines the relationship between internet usage and economic development by analyzing global internet penetration rates alongside GDP per capita data obtained from the World Bank database. The goal of this research is to determine whether higher levels of internet accessibility are associated with stronger economic performance across countries over time.Two large-scale datasets were collected from the World Bank: Individuals using the Internet as a percentage of the population and GDP per capita in current US dollars. Each dataset originally contains 266 entities, including countries and World Bank aggregates, and 70 columns with yearly values spanning from 1960 to 2024. During the ETL process, unnecessary metadata columns and empty fields were removed, aggregate entries were filtered out, and the datasets were reshaped from wide format to long format so that each row represents a single country-year observation. The datasets were then merged using country and year as shared variables, resulting in a final dataset of 17,290 observations with five key variables: country name, country code, year, internet usage, and GDP per capita.To ensure data reliability, preprocessing techniques were applied to address missing values, normalization, and filtering. Exploratory data analysis was conducted to examine global and regional trends over time. Correlation and regression analyses were then performed to evaluate the strength and direction of the relationship between digital connectivity and economic indicators. The results indicate a positive correlation between internet accessibility and GDP per capita, suggesting that countries with higher levels of internet adoption tend to demonstrate stronger economic development. Overall, this study highlights the importance of expanding internet access as a key factor in promoting long-term economic growth and reducing global inequality.