An Empirical Investigation on associated linkage between Human Development and ICT: A South Asian Perspective

In the wake of industrial revolution in the late 18th and 19th centuries, technology as a seminal force has impacted everything and its effects are much more beyond the pertinent human comprehension. Most of the studies use per capita GDP as a measure to map the economic well-being of any nation but it is a narrower indicator. Human development could be considered to be the key that acts as a binding force to absorb the technological driven advancements. Taking this perspective, we contemplate the emergent prerequisite of finding the association between human capital development and information & communication technology (ICT) framework. The current study attempts to analyze how advancement in ICT could promote human capital development with special reference to South Asian Region (SAR) over the period 2000-16 by employing panel fixed effects modeling. Where, social human capital is proxied by the Human Development Index (HDI) and the the ICT penetration is measured by the parameters like technological readiness, mobile cellular subscriptions, and internet penetration. This is supplemented by other key macroeconomic control variables like population growth, urbanization sprawl, etc. in order to obtain an umbrella view. In order to have an in-depth understanding, individual component level linkages of HDI such as per capita GDP, birth life expectancy and school enrollment rate with ICT and other macroeconomic demographic indicators are also tested separately.The empirical analysis results hint towards the strong positive associations of internet penetration, technological readiness, and mobile usage with the human development index. The overall results are found to be in sync with the key findings. Therefore, the study recommends a cohesive ecosystem that could amalgamate technological space with HDI in the contemporary framework. The study further concludes with the key policy implications.