Smartphones support smart labour

ABSTRACT

Besides enabling communication, smartphones support information flows and financial transactions, especially in developing countries, where the coverage of landline networks is limited. Drawing upon new data of rural households in the Mekong region, this article finds that smartphone ownership increases labour mobility measured as the number of commuters whereas it seems to discourage the emigration of workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Smartphones
• labour market
• labour mobility
• economic development
• Southeast Asia

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C31
• J61
• O33
• O53
• R23

Acknowledgements

We thank an anonymous reviewer, our colleagues and the enumerators involved in the data collection and cleaning as well as Ulrike Grote, Hermann Waibel and the other scholars of the DFG project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ Characterized by a touch screen, Internet access and software applications (“apps”).

² One of eight province-specific effects is left out to avoid collinearity with the constant.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge financial support by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the project FOR 756.