Assessing the regional digital divide across the European Union-27

Despite the efforts devoted to the analysis of the digital divide over the last years, the regional evidence on this issue is still scarce. Within this context, the goals of this paper are twofold: (1) measuring the digital divide across the regions of the 27 Member States and within each country and (2) explaining the observed regional disparities. The analysis leads to identify Dutch regions as the Top-10 in ICT, while Greece and Bulgaria occupy the Bottom-10. Therefore, results show that the regional digital divide reflects to some extent the income gap. However, regional policy seems to be having some positive implications for technology adoption. In particular, the rural-versus-urban dimension of the digital gap appears to be less important than it is usually claimed to. Likewise, some evidence is found of the role of cultural and institutional factors in ICT adoption, an issue that has not been previously analyzed at the regional level.