Productivity claims alone don't justify NBN - ZDNet - 21 Aug 2011

One of the murkiest and most problematic areas of support for the NBN is the implicit assumption that better broadband access will boost our national productivity. This, in turn, invariably seems to spawn problematic attempts to quantify these improvements — and conflict over what are often optimistic assumptions piled upon others.

An attempt to do just that has met with resistance from some New Zealand economists, as a Berl Economics report has suggested that the country's Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) broadband roll-out could boost national GDP by 7 per cent to 9 per cent by 2025 (that's not per year, but compared to growth over that time without the UFB). A report from the firm, weighing the GDP benefits of an early UFB roll-out to Wellington, predicted that such a roll-out "could add around 11 per cent to GDP growth by 2026", and that a delayed roll-out would pull this back to around 8.8 per cent. The report envisioned the benefit to Wellington as being higher than that of New Zealand as a whole, where it envisioned additional GDP of 8.9 per cent through 2026 in an early roll-out scenario and 7.2 per cent under a delayed roll-out.

Full Story