Digital Divide and Sectoral Employment in Developing Economies

This repository contains the data and replication materials for the study “Digital Divide and Structural Transformation: Evidence from Sectoral Employment in Developing and Emerging Economies.” The empirical dataset is a strongly balanced country-year panel covering 96 developing and emerging economies over the period 2007–2022. The dataset includes sectoral employment shares in industry, agriculture, and services; sectoral value-added indicators; urbanization; trade openness; gross capital formation; human capital; government effectiveness; electricity access; and the ICT variables used to construct the digital-development measure. The composite ICT index is constructed using fixed broadband subscriptions, Internet use, fixed telephone subscriptions, and mobile-cellular subscriptions. The main digital-divide indicator measures each country’s normalized annual distance from the ICT frontier within the study sample. The repository includes the final harmonized panel dataset, the constructed ICT index, the distance-to-frontier digital-divide indicator, variables used in the income-group heterogeneity and instrumental-variable analyses, and Stata do-files required to reproduce the fixed-effects estimates, channel analysis, clustered-bootstrap indirect effects, heterogeneity analysis, instrumental-variable estimates, and robustness checks. The underlying indicators were compiled from publicly available international databases, including the World Development Indicators, the International Telecommunication Union, the UNCTAD Productive Capacities Index, the Penn World Table, and the Worldwide Governance Indicators. Users of the replication package should cite the original data providers where appropriate.