About 57 percent of U.S. farms have Internet access, up about seven percentage points since 2002, and 58 percent of U.S. farms using the Internet now buy high-speed Internet access, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2002, the Census found that half the farms in the country were connected to the Internet in some way, using either broadband or dial-up services.

 

So 33 percent of farms in 2007 purchased broadband connections.

 

There is widespread belief this might change as rural broadband support mandated by the economic stimulus bill goes to work. The bad news is that some economists say rural broadband might not contribute much job creation. In fact, there is potential not only for job creation, but also job destruction once broadband is available. That isn’t to say building new broadband access facilities will not generate some amount of permanent job gains once construction is finished. It just isn’t possible to say how much.

 

Some new jobs would have been created in some regions without the new broadband and without any stimulus at all. Still, Raul Katz, a Columbia Business School professor, estimates that rural broadband construction triggered by the broadband provisions of the stimulus bill will require 128,000 jobs designing, building and administering the broadband networks.

 

That figure also includes a multiplier effect that assumes that every 10 people directly hired by these projects will spend enough money to create eight more jobs in other sectors.

 

The problem is that it is not clear the mere availability of broadband actually will stimulate much development, beyond employing people temporarily to build the new facilities. “The impact of broadband on outsourcing operates in the two directions: broadband can facilitate the attraction of new jobs and it can enable the relocation of others in regions other than the one being targeted,” Katz says.

 

There is another negative we do not typically think about: broadband should boost productivity. Higher productivity should mean more output with fewer inputs. Jobs are an input. So there will be some job loss because broadband is in place.

 

In fact, the long term impact could range from a loss of 110,000 jobs to the creation of 164,000 jobs. The most likely scenario lies in between, at creating 136,000 jobs.