Mobile internet, skills and structural transformation in Rwanda
Professor Marco Grazzi, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Department of Economic Policy,
This paper looks at the relation between mobile internet, employment and structural transformation in Rwanda. Internet coverage, by enabling access to a wide range of ICT technologies, has indeed the potential to greatly affect the dynamics and the composition of employment. To this end, we combine the GSMA network coverage maps with individual information from national population censuses and labor force surveys, creating a district-level dataset of Rwanda that covers the period 2002 - 2019. Our results show that an increase in mobile internet coverage affects the labour market in two ways. First, by increasing employment opportunities. Second, by contributing to changes in its composition. Education, migration and shifts in demand-side can help rationalizing our finding.
About the speaker
Marco Grazzi is full professor at the Department of Economic Policy, Universita' Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano. His research focuses on the role of firms in shaping aggregate industry and country dynamics. To this end, his works embrace a number of fields such as international trade, firm growth and its relation to innovation, and the analysis of production, both from a theoretical and empirical point of view. His current projects focus on the role of new technologies and international trade in shaping firm and employment dynamics, and how innovation, as proxied by IP instruments, affect the diversification strategies of firms.
He earned his PhD at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, after spending one year as visiting scholar at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (US). He has later visited a number of institutions, among which, EPFL (Switzerland), University of Cambridge (UK) and Notre Dame (US). He is and has been involved in a number of research project funded both at national (MIUR) and international level (EU EC H2020).
His works have been published, among the other journals, on Industrial and Corporate Change, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Journal of Industrial Economics, Research Policy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Review of World Economics, Small Business Economics.
He is Associate editor for Industrial and Corporate Change and for the Journal of Industrial and Business Economics, and in the Editorial Review Board for Small Business Economics.
His personal website is available at: http://mgrazzi.github.io/
Venue: via Zoom (please contact us at seminars@merit.unu.edu for the Zoom link)
Date: 28 April 2022
Time: 12:00 - 13:00 CET
