Is ICT a new essential for national economic growth in an information society?

This paper attempts to empirically verify the theoretical assumption that ICT factors affect national economic development. To this end, this study will use a research model to examine the relationship between ICT and development through statistical evidence. IT infrastructure, IT competence, IT investment and IT trade size will be selected as variables reflecting ICT factors since these are widely used by the balance model of supply and demand. Also, this paper will employ several socio-economic factors such as population size, consumer inflation, national corruption and education as control variables. A panel data analysis was used to statistically verify the impact of national ICT capability on a country's development. Furthermore, this paper tried to find an intervening variable between ICT and national development such as national corruption, consumer. inflation and national education that have been highlighted as important elements of national development from political and social perspectives, and improved explanatory power of the analysis model. This result indicates that these variables mediate ICT capacity's effects on each surveyed nation's economic growth. This study verified statistic relevance for the effects that ICT capacity has on economic development. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.