Impact of social media on economic growth – evidence from social media

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to investigate the impact of social media (SM) on economic growth. Using information obtained from memberships to social networks, we find that SM has a negative and significant impact on economic growth. This provides evidence in favour of our hypothesis that SM increases the search costs for information and also increases the substitution effect from labour to leisure thereby producing a negative impact on growth.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• social networking
• economic growth

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• O039
• O030
• C23

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.