The Bandwidth of Learning: Digital Infrastructure, Test Scores, and the Pandemic Divide

Digital infrastructure has become an increasingly prominent element in education, a trend accelerated by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper utilises individual student effects and country-level estimates to investigate whether digital infrastructure, measured by broadband penetration, enhances academic outcomes for students and whether its role changed during the pandemic. It also examines whether digital infrastructure mitigates the effects of school closures and distance learning. Analysing Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 and 2022 data, merged with International Telecommunications Union (ITU) broadband coverage data, the results demonstrate that near-universal LTE/WiMAX coverage is associated with higher test scores, particularly in reading. Furthermore, test scores across mathematics, science, and reading declined on average, due to the exogenous effects of the pandemic, while mobile coverage had a small mitigating effect on the decline.