Digital connectivity and adjusted net savings in developing economies

Existing digital-sustainability research focuses mainly on partial outcomes, leaving the relationship between Internet adoption and integrated wealth-accounting outcomes unclear. This study examines the association between Internet adoption and adjusted net savings (ANS), an annual wealth-change indicator that integrates net national savings and education expenditure with deductions for resource depletion and pollution damages. The candidate panel covers 131 developing economies during 2005–2021; the fully adjusted model uses 1291 country-year observations from 96 economies. Two-way fixed-effects estimates with country-clustered inference are complemented by difference and trend specifications, sample-selection and historical income-classification checks, common-sample interaction tests with multiplicity correction, and an exact common-sample ANS decomposition. In the fully adjusted model, a one-percentage-point increase in lagged Internet use is associated with − 0.0539% points of ANS/GNI (95% CI − 0.1336 to 0.0259). The estimate is stable to country exclusion and alternative income classifications but changes sign under country-specific trend specifications, indicating that the average relationship is not uniformly directional. No primary moderator survives Benjamini–Hochberg or Holm correction. The exact decomposition reveals offsetting constituent associations: particulate-emission damage remains statistically detectable after both corrections, while forest depletion survives FDR only. These findings show that the sustainability implications of digital access are multidimensional and sensitive to trend treatment rather than captured by a single average effect. The study contributes a wealth-accounting perspective, exact decomposition, and disciplined sensitivity analysis for evaluating digital access alongside the broader asset base relevant to sustainable development and SDG monitoring.