ICTs and Poverty in Latin America

Abstract

Poverty reduction has been a subject widely discussed and analyzed by different academic disciplines, however, so far has not found a magic formula to mitigate this problem. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the contribution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to the eradication of poverty in developing countries. The main result of this work is that technological change is an important factor for the reduction of poverty and inequality in the Latin American region. For ICTs to increase the total factor productivity of each country, policies are needed to improve the quality of education, protection of property rights and access to ICTs for households and for public and private enterprises.

Keywords

• Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)
• poverty
• Latin-America
• developing economies
• public policies