The impact of ICT development on the global digital divide

Information and communication technology (ICT) has accelerated the growth of the global economy and improved the quality life of the world’s inhabitants. ICT has brought new ways of creating livelihoods for people. The diffusion of ICT has also increased year by year and made it possible to reduce poverty. The opportunities created by ICT also may eventually decrease the “distance” between countries in many other ways. Because access to ICT plays a key role in defining the global digital divide, it is important to study how the ICT gaps among countries have changed. This study examines global ICT development in the last decade. We collected secondary data for 136 countries from 2000 to 2008. Four relevant variables are used as proxies for the ICT development status of a country. Because of this multivariate nature of the data, most previous studies have applied a composite index approach to represent the ICT status of a country. For this study, we developed a framework to reduce multivariate raw data into an ordinal number representing a country’s ICT development level. The methodology behind the framework involves data clustering and multi-dimensional data ranking. After applying this data reduction procedure, we explored ICT development paths of different countries, and also conducted panel data analysis based on gross national income and various fixed effects.

► We collected secondary data of ICT relevant variables of 136 countries from 2000 to 2008. ► We conducted panel data studies based on gross national income and various fixed effects. ► We found that ICT development of most countries converged near the end of the study period. ► Our results showed that countries with different GNI levels have different ICT development paths.