Heterogeneous effects of different factors on global ICT adoption

Numerous studies focus on the analysis of the effects of different factors on global information and communication technology (ICT) adoption. Due to the limitations of the least squares method in showing the impact of the estimated coefficients on the mean, this study applies quantile regression to examine the heterogeneous effects of various factors on global ICT adoption. This study finds that the impacts on the tail quantiles can be very different from the impacts on the conditional means. The empirical results show that the effects at different quantile levels are very different from those at their counterpart conditional means. We also provide relevant explanations for the effects.

Research highlights
► We apply quantile regression to examine the heterogeneous effects of factors on global ICT adoption.
► We find that the impacts on the tail quantiles are different from the impacts on the conditional means.
► The QR method provides an effective understanding of the situations and developments.
► The effect of GDP per capita turns saturated when it goes beyond the 70th quantile.