Economic Openness and Media Penetration

Using country-level data, this study proposes and tests a multivariate model explaining levels of media penetration around the world, with special interest in the impact of an increasingly global economy on media industries. This study finds that countries with more open economies (i.e., those more exposed to the world market) tend to have higher penetration rates of newspapers, per-sonal computers, Internet hosts, and main telephone lines, even after control-ling for GDP per capita, literacy, urbanization, population, levels of democ-racy and freedom, and regional variables. The data cover most of the countries in the world. The results indicate a link between a global economy and an “information age”—an enormous expansion of world communication. This study complements earlier research on the economic constraints of media pen-etration; most of the earlier work was done in a U.S. setting and focused on GDP per capita in explaining media penetration