Some empirical evidence on Internet diffusion in the New Member States and Candidate Countries of the European Union

Abstract

This article contributes to the line of research devoted to the diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In particular, we analyse Internet adoption in the New Member States (NMS) and Candidate Countries (CC) of the European Union, for which empirical evidence is quite scarce. Results confirm that income, educational attainment and age are the main determinants of Internet use. Nonetheless, there are substantial differences in the impacts of such variables in the nine analysed countries.

Notes

¹ Authors' calculations based on SIBIS dataset.

² A technology is said to exhibit network externalities when its value to a user depends on how many other users there are (Shapiro and Varian, 1999).

³ Results of the pooled models are available upon request. Despite the fact that the explanatory variables were statistically significant and entered in with the right sign, the Hosmer and Lemeshow test results for goodness-of-fit indicate that the aggregate models were not accurate. Such results might be explained by the aforementioned huge disparities between countries.