SUNDE T WORLD DEVELOPMENT

The empirical analysis combines annual country-level data from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Data Hub, the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI), International Telecommunication Union (ITU) indicators accessed through WDI/ITU, and the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). The study population comprises economies classified as developing by UNCTAD, while regional and subregional groupings follow the United Nations M49 classification. The candidate sample contains 74 developing economies observed over 2010–2024. The starting year is determined by the availability and comparability of the digitally deliverable services export series used as the principal explanatory variable, giving a maximum of 1,110 country-year observations. The main analysis uses an unbalanced panel rather than imposing a balanced-panel requirement that would discard otherwise usable within-country information. No interpolation or imputation is undertaken. The main estimation sample is determined by the joint availability of RGPC, LDSE, DINF and the six baseline controls and contains 918 country-year observations for 71 economies; Jamaica, Jordan and Nigeria contribute no complete baseline observations. DSEX is available for 1,065 candidate observations, while DSEX and the variables required to construct DINF are jointly available for 1,017 observations. The balanced panel used only for the threshold test contains 38 economies observed every year, yielding 570 observations. Model-specific complete cases are used elsewhere so that missingness, rather than an arbitrary minimum-history rule, determines the estimation sample. Before estimation, country-year identifiers were checked for duplication, numeric variables were parsed consistently, and formula-derived variables, including LPRO, DSGD and INST, were reconstructed from their underlying series. The baseline data are not winsorised; tail treatment is assessed separately as a robustness exercise. These procedures preserve the sample and transformations used in the reported results.