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In Africa, entrepreneurship remains predominantly informal, but the rapid spread of mobile phone and Internet use is often viewed as an opportunity to boost the productivity and output of informal firms. Yet little is known on how informal entrepreneurs use these technologies for their business. The purpose of this paper is to open the black box of 'mobile usage' and investigate its effects on the performance of informal micro and small enterprises. To do so, we develop an original conceptual framework of mobile usage and apply a three‐step empirical approach based on a unique dataset of informal firms in Dakar. The first step allows us to identify rich 'mobile usage' measures that examine the different economic functions supported by mobile phones (coordination, finance and management) and the multiple dimensions of use (range and intensity). The second step identifies four user profiles with specific forms of appropriation: disconnected entrepreneurs, networkers, Internet explorers and digital entrepreneurs. The third step uses a stochastic frontier approach to investigate whether these profiles increase the economic efficiency of informal firms. Our findings suggest that while the most advanced uses of mobile phones have an incremental impact on sales efficiency, the potential for improvement remains limited. Only networkers' coordination uses show a significant impact on value added and profit, while the ways in which Internet explorers and digital entrepreneurs use a mobile phone have only a limited impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In the paper, results of a field research among managers working in Slovene rural tourism SMEs are presented. A questionnaire was developed and employed to measure their perceptions of the ICT influence on their firms' efficiency. The correlation analysis results showed that the most important factor affecting firms' revenue growth, profitability, organizational climate and customers' satisfaction are perceived benefits from ICT use. Expectedly, younger and more educated managers, as well as those operating in firms with more employees, perceive the role of ICT as more important than their older and less educated counterparts. Furthermore, it was established by linear regression analysis, where a composite performance indicator was used as dependent variable, that perception of the ICT benefits and ICT skills significantly positively affect the firms' performance. The results may present a valuable information for decision-makers when preparing strategies and plans for rural tourism development, investments in ICT infrastructure, for specific promotional actions, and education programs development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been debated as to whether European countries and Italy itself have yet shared in the US productivity growth driven by the information and communication technology (ICT) revolution. This paper investigates the extent of ICT diffusion in manufacturing firms from an Italian region and its effect on performance at a micro-level from 2002 to 2008. It contributes to previous findings from three perspectives. First, it investigates the causal link between ICT adoption and productivity; second, it considers the distributional effect of ICT by measuring its impact on firms with different levels of efficiency and productivity; and third, it takes into account the important distinction between productive ICT embedded in machinery and capital equipment and integrating ICT acquired as licenses or know-how as external disembodied technology, with the basic purpose being to identify the channels through which ICT may work for different types of firms. The main findings are that (i) a wide dissemination of ICT is not exploited to its full potential; (ii) the ICT adoption has produced higher growth in technical efficiency for adopter firms than for the non-adopter firms, but slower growth in productivity, so supporting the productive paradox at the firm level; and (iii) different types of ICTs have had opposite impact among adopter firms – the adoption of ICTs as productive embodied technologies has accelerated the performance growth of firms with lower growth rates, while the adoption of ICTs of organisational type has increased their delay in efficiency and productivity with respect to the firms with higher growth rates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]