Exploring the Predictors of the International Digital Divide

• Activity Number: 82
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 3, 2014 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): Dominique Haughton*+ and Maria Skaletsky and Mayo Soremekun
• Companies: Bentley University/U. Paris I and Bentley University and D50-Media
• Keywords: Global digital divide ; Treenet ; Internet use ; Mobile phone subscriptions

Abstract

In this study we examine the relative importance of several predictors of the global Digital Divide commonly used in the digital divide research. We use data for 167 countries for the year 2010. We employ the TreeNet methodology by Salford Systems, which has not been previously used in digital divide studies. Doing so allows for providing a more detailed and complete picture of the relationships among the predictors of the level of Internet use and mobile phone subscriptions across counties, compared to past studies. We build separate models for the level of Internet use and for the number of mobile phones subscriptions at a country level and find these models to be different. We also evaluate the importance of predictors which propel countries to top or bottom levels of digital development and identify interactions among the predictors. We identify institutional stability to be as important as national income in predicting the level of Internet use overall in all the countries included in the sample, while national income was found to be the most significant predictor in past studies. We identify levels of infrastructure development to be the most important determinant of the like