Abstract
This paper addresses the international and internal digital divides that exist across and within the European member states according to the educational attainment of their populations. Our results suggest that even for those European countries that are outperforming their counterparts in terms of digital development, such as Finland, some internal gaps still remain and need to be addressed. In other countries, as in the cases of Malta, Spain, and Portugal, the divides are a matter for concern. These findings would probably be overlooked if we worked only with aggregate levels, as is usual. Consequently, this paper draws attention to the importance of complementing cross-country analysis of the digital divide with an assessment of internal gaps.
Keywords
Digital divide; Digital development; ICT; Education; Digital agenda; European union
1. Introduction
Although information and communication technologies (ICT) are today profoundly intertwined with almost every aspect of economic and social activities, they still continue to hold the promise of tremendous innovation and development opportunities, provided that the right enabling conditions are put into place (European Commission, 2013). The conviction that greater adoption and use of ICT will foster growth and development, trumping the present economic difficulties, has been supported by some leading nations and world organizations (European Commission, 2010a, European Commission, 2010b, National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council, 1996, OECD, 2011, Unesco, 2009, US Department of Commerce, 2000 and US Department of Commerce, 2002). At the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), sponsored by the United Nations (UN), it was declared that the global challenge for the new millennium is to build a society “where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life” ( WSIS, 2003 and WSIS, 2005).
In this context, the existence of the digital inequalities both between and within countries, poses a major threat to the fulfilment of ICT potential. The digital divide has been defined as “the gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographic areas at different socio-economic levels with regard both to their opportunities to access ICT and to their use of the Internet for a wide variety of activities.” ( OECD, 2001).
There have been multiple efforts to quantify/measure the international digital divide, that is, the digital gap across countries (Cruz-Jesus et al., 2012, Cuervo and Menéndez, 2006 and Dewan et al., 2005). However, these efforts have generally neglected the fact that within each country there might also be digital inequalities related to population's socio-economic imbalances. Research on digital divide has shown that several socio-economic factors lead to asymmetries in ICT adoption and use between individuals: income, age, and educational attainment, among others (Dewan & Riggins, 2005). Education, in particular, reveals itself as an extremely important factor because, not only are more educated individuals more likely to have less difficulty coping with technology's complexity (Rogers, 2005), but they will also most likely be exposed to ICT in their professional and personal lives. This paper focuses on measuring the education-related digital divide, i.e., the digital gap between countries, controlling for the level of education of their population, which is to say, the digital asymmetries that may exist in each country due to differences in education level of the country's population.
The context of our study is the European Union (EU), which is not immune to the digital divide, and recognizes that developing a digital economy based on knowledge and innovation is a critical issue for the Union's present and future growth and competitiveness (European Commission, 2010b). The European Commission's (EC) 2020 Strategy seeks “a smart, sustainable and inclusive growth for European Economy” ( European Commission, 2010b) and “to exit the crisis and prepare the EU economy for the challenges of the next decade” ( European Commission, 2010a). The Digital Agenda for Europe, included in the Europe 2020 Strategy as the first of the seven strategy's flagships, aims to reboot Europe's economy and help Europe's citizens and businesses to get the most out of ICT (European Commission, 2010a). Hence, detecting and correcting digital inequalities becomes a must in order to avoid jeopardizing 2020 Strategy's objectives.
The goal of this paper is to address the role that educational imbalances have on the digital divide among the citizens of the 28 member states of the European Union (EU-28). In particular, the research questions of this paper are the following: (1) what are the most important features of the digital divide across the 28 member states of the European Union? (2) To what extent is there an educational-related domestic digital divide in the EU-28 and how does it shape countries' imbalances? In answering these questions the remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the theoretical background; Section 3 describes the data; Section 4 presents the methodology, analysis, and discussion of the results; Section 5 draws some concluding remarks.
2. Theoretical background
2.1. Literature review
Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of ICT as, perhaps, the key general purpose technology (GPT – technological innovations that have the potential to improve most industries and society sectors) of present times (Bresnahan and Trajtenberg, 1995, Doong and Ho, 2012 and European Commission, 2013). This “digital” revolution began with the automation and computerization of manufacturing, and was followed by the widespread of personal computers (PC) and the Internet, which led to the fact that broad sectors of the economy, previously untouched by ICT, benefited from these through investment and productivity improvements. Tertiary (market services) sectors, which account for the major portion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in developed economies, have experienced considerable benefits from these technologies. Thereafter, non-market sectors such as financial, health, education, and even government-services have become more prone to the positive growth effects from ICT (European Commission, 2013).
ICT in general and the Internet in particular have allowed the implementation of a whole range of new services that have completely changed the way individuals and firms interact and communicate, do business, pursue economic growth, improve welfare, and even the way politics are conducted (OECD, 2004 and Zhao et al., 2007). Internet browsing, email, VoIP, blogs, multimedia online streaming, social networking, on-line job seeking, wiki-sites, access to online libraries, e-commerce, and services like e-government, e-health, e-learning, and e-banking are examples of new possibilities that allow new types of communications and interactions for individuals, firms, and governments (Çilan et al., 2009, European Commission, 2006, Facer, 2007, Forman, 2005, Hajli, 2014, Mutula and Brakel, 2006, Niehaves and Plattfaut, 2013, Vicente and Gil-de-Bernabé, 2010 and Vicente and Lopez, 2010b).
Despite the multiple benefits that ICT may bring, not everything regarding these technologies does necessarily leads to positive outcomes. The idea that ICT will enable a whole new world of endless opportunities, liberated from problematic sociocultural aspects, such as gender, age, race, and geography is utopic (Gunkel, 2003). As the spread of ICT became wider, it quickly became clear that access (and later on, use) was limited by specific constraints and should not be assumed by researchers and policy makers to be either universal or instantaneous. It was within this context that the term “digital divide” appeared. Although the literature and forums on the subject regularly attribute the term to Larry Irving Junior, former Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information of the US Department of Commerce, the fact is that it was not authored by him, as he himself admitted years later (Gunkel, 2003). The “digital divide” term became popular in the third “Falling Through the Net” report, from the US Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) (US Department of Commerce, 1999), which defined it as “the divide between those with access to new technologies and those without”. Within the series of these reports ( US Department of Commerce, 1995, US Department of Commerce, 1998, US Department of Commerce, 1999, US Department of Commerce, 2000 and US Department of Commerce, 2002) the definition of digital divide evolved from merely PC ownership, to the inclusion of Internet access, and later, to the availability of broadband connections and the types of online usages. In fact, literature distinguishes between the inequalities about access to and use of ICT, the so-called first- and second-order digital divides first- and second-order digital divides ( Dewan and Riggins, 2005 and DiMaggio et al., 2004). In the first-order digital divide the inequalities are with regard to ICT access, while in the second-order the problem is postulated in terms of different use patterns and intensity among individuals/organizations that already have (very similar) access to ICT (e.g., using the Internet just for web-browsing or email vs. using it for e-learning, social-network, applying to jobs online, e-banking, e-health, etc.).
Research has shown that both types of divides are mainly shaped by socio-economic inequalities among countries and individuals. Hence, those who are economically and sociologically disadvantaged (i.e., individuals with lower incomes or education levels, those with disabilities, living in rural area