The financial access, ICT trade balance and dark and bright sides of digitalization nexus in OECD countries

The information and communication technology (ICT) of trade balance is one of the main facilitators of any business sustainability. As ICT and financial inclusion eases access to knowledge and enhances significantly developing several human skills and competencies, its impact in industrial sectors has mainly recognized as positive. But digitalization as well arguable comes with some other challenges, while disruptive digital innovations exerted on different industries and economies. In this spirit, this study aims to measure the impact of financial access and the information and communication technology (ICT) trade balance on the dark and bright sides of digitalization. Data has been collected from 31 countries of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for the period of 2008–2019. Technological growth, technological innovation, technological performance risk and ethical proxies were used to examine the dark and bright sides of digitalization. The main findings were consistent and confirmed by the estimated panel least squares, fixed and random effects, feasible generalized least squares and system generalized method of moments (S-GMM) estimators. Financial access has found to have a significant negative impact on the digitalization proxies reflecting the dark side of digitalization in all estimators. Whereas, the ICT trade balance has found to have a significant positive impact on digitalization proxies reflecting the bright side of digitalization in most estimators. These results contribute to the policy debate on the importance of digital finance models and ICT exports awareness when promoting the bright side of digitalization. Furthermore, policy makers should monitor and update information that is disclosed digitally as the results of this study extended support the creative destruction theory which implicitly included economic innovation and the business cycle theories.