Fabricating a Broadband Crisis? More Evidence on the Misleading Inferences from OECD Rankings

Abstract

In this Perspective, I provide more evidence demonstrating the illegitimacy of the OECD’s per-capita broadband rankings as a reliable measure of relative performance for broadband adoption. Using the OECD’s own data on per-capita adoption and household adoption across the OECD, numerous examples are provided demonstrating the misleading conclusions drawn from the per-capita data. In light of this additional evidence, the use of per-capita rankings for policy formation is again discouraged. Additionally, I provided a brief discussion in the general weakness of rankings data of any sort, and demonstrate why the whole exercise of comparing adoption rates is not productive. Comparing adoption is not useful absent some measure of the relative productivity of adoption across countries.

Keywords: Broadband, Internet, OECD, Rankings, Telecommunications, Per-Capita

JEL Classification: C10, F00, K20, L50, L52, L86, L96