The Telecommunications Industry Complex in the Mississippi Delta Region of the U.S. 1988-1996: Implications for Infrastructure and Economic Development Policy


Roberta Lentz and Michael Oden, Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin

Increasingly, telecommunications is being advanced as a keystone industry, reshaping the economic development prospects of regions, cities, and rural areas. Recent studies highlight the numerous benefits that telecommunications and information technology industries bring to the U.S. economy. At the same time, the market and regulatory forces driving the spread of new telecom and information technologies raise new and serious questions about uneven access to and capacity to use new technologies. In particular, access and use seem positively associated with income and level of urbanization. In the current era
of deregulation and rapid technological change, new technologies are first developed and implemented in major market areas -- typically larger and wealthier metro regions. For this reason, rural regions may be at a serious disadvantage in leveraging the latest digital technologies to maintain or improve their economic competitiveness.

We examine the presence of telecom and information industries in the Mississippi Delta to understand their implications on the economic prospects of poorer rural regions. The Delta was recently acknowledged by President Clinton as one of the most economically depressed in the United States and one of the sites of his New Markets Initiative designed to spread the benefits of economic growth to regions left out of the current boom. It is widely claimed that access to and effective utilization of electronic information and communications capabilities are critical to allowing businesses to compete in product markets and households to increase skill and income. However, limited work has been done to determine which telecom technologies are the most important and appropriate to public and private sector institutions in the rural Delta. Similarly, little information is available concerning the presence or capacity to use telecommunications and related high technology industries in rural regions such as the Mississippi Delta.

The study offers a basis for understanding the importance of telecommunications and related industries in a 58-county region bordering the Mississippi River in three states: Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It provides essential information on the core telecommunications manufacturing and services industries in the Delta, the main suppliers to these industries, and the industry sectors that rely heavily on core telecommunications manufacturing and services to competitively produce and market their products and services is provided at four geographic levels: regional, metro, near-metro, and rural. Findings indicate that core telecommunications industries in the region constitute an emerging growth sector and that the industries that rely on telecom outputs in their business operations are large and growing, constituting many of the major economic growth sectors in the regional economy.

The study argues for considerable attention on analysis of the development and use of telecommunications technologies in the region. Without this, the Delta risks losing additional ground to more urbanized, wealthier areas that are rapidly implementing the latest digital technologies. The central economic development challenge will be to ensure that rural businesses, government, education, and non-profit institutions have access to a world-class telecommunications infrastructure and that they have the capacity to leverage this access to enhance their performance and expand their reach.