Financial Crisis and the ICT Industry, Cross Market Research on Europe, US, Turkish and Gulf Countries

Abstract

The ICT industry has been the driver for economic growth for several years before the financial crisis. The purpose of the paper is to look at the effects of last financial crisis on the ICT industry and how this macroeconomic shock was transmitted to households. Since the cost of capital became much higher, this weakened the long-term growth of companies, especially those in needs of financing. Also this had a major effect on consumers, who freeze spending, which eventually decreases revenues for companies. Moreover, we aim to provide new empirical evidence on the impact of world financial crisis on the ICT industry and CPI index in different areas of the world. By using different simulations and analysis, we investigate the effect of the crisis on ICT industries and households. We propose a statistical model based on Pearson’s r and linear regression. We use GDP values from four different markets, which are United States, European, Turkish and Gulf Countries and we apply our statistical model with normalization. We use gross domestic product for tracking the financial crisis, consumer price index for households and percentage of ICT Export and Import on the whole export and import of the market as indicator. The statistical model we proposed has a high success rate for between 50% to 77%, depending on the variables and the markets. We also demonstrate the correlation between ICT and GDP in four regions and we show there is 1-year delay between the movement of ICT graph and GDP graph. From this information, it is possible to make predictions about financial crisis via ICT.

Keywords: Financial Crisis, ICT, Data Mining, Business Intelligence.