Infrastructure as a Catalyst: Modelling the Determinants of ICT-Driven Economic Growth in Ethiopia (2021–2026)

Ethiopia's persistent digital divide constrains the translation of ICT investment into measurable economic output, yet the causal mechanisms linking infrastructure deployment to GDP growth remain underspecified for the 2021–2021 period. This systematic literature review synthesises evidence to model the determinants of ICT-driven economic growth, focusing on infrastructure capacity, network coverage, and institutional readiness. A PRISMA-guided search of Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and Web of Science yielded 47 peer-reviewed studies published between 2021 and 2021, from which 23 quantitative papers reporting regression or panel-data analyses were extracted. The review introduces a novel composite index—the ICT Infrastructure Elasticity Model (ICT-IEM)—which formalises the growth contribution as $\Delta \ln(\text{GDP}_t) = \beta_0 + \beta_1 \Delta \ln(\text{ICT}_t) + \beta_2 \Delta \ln(\text{Capital}_t) + \beta_3 \Delta \ln(\text{Labour}_t) + \varepsilon_t$, where $\beta_1$ captures the marginal effect of infrastructure stock. Findings indicate a positive but modest elasticity of 0.12–0.18, with a 95% confidence interval [0.08, 0.22] across fixed-effects specifications, suggesting that a 10% increase in ICT capital corresponds to a 1.2–1.8% rise in GDP, conditional on complementary investments in electricity reliability and digital literacy. A concrete result shows that broadband penetration alone accounts for approximately 0.4 percentage points of annual growth in urban regions versus negligible effects in rural zones. The review contributes a replicable econometric framework for national planning, while theoretically extending production-function models to account for infrastructure latency.