The economic impact of 5G in Croatia

Commissioned by: Croatian Telekom
Project duration: March 25, 2021 – April 20, 2022
Project manager: Maruška Vizek
Collaborators: Davor Mikulić, Nebojša Stojčić, Dragana Radusinović

Summary: 
The aim of this project was to produce a publication delineating wider long-term economic benefits of 5G deployment in the Republic of Croatia. In order to achieve this, we relied on two approaches. In the first one, we estimated the non-linear relationship between increase in mobile speed, as one of several key features of 5G, and various economic outcomes for various sectors of interest (e.g., agriculture, manufacture, services, digital sector, knowledge-intensive sector, export-oriented sector) and different regions of the country. The second approach enumerated costs of 5G deployment for various economic sectors of interest (i.e., use cases) and compared them to the economic benefits that were the result of 5G availability for these use cases. This approach entailed several advantages. First, it produced the overall rate of return of 5G deployment in Croatia. Second, it disaggregated the overall rate of return to the return of 5G deployment in various economic sectors, thus highlighting the use cases which stood to gain the most from 5G deployment. Third, by comparing costs of 5G deployment with the benefits in individual use cases, it distinguished 5G use cases which were commercially attractive from use cases which will probably require public subsidies.