The local digital divide in Spain: explanatory factors

Paper submitted to the 50th Anniversary European Congress of the Regional Science Association International, Jönköping, Sweden, 19th-23rd August 2010.The diffusion and the use of the Information and the Communication Technologies (ITC) are generating changes in all the levels of the economy (knowledge access, organization of the work, organization of the government or public services, among others). The ITC are determinant elements in the economic development also they can help to increase the differences between those who have and do not have access to they. Numerous studies demonstrate the existence of this digital gap not only among developed countries and developing countries but also, inside the same country, among rural and urban areas. These studies have tried to relate the unequal access to the ITC to a series of factors, as the GDP, the human capital, the level of development of the infrastructures of telecommunications or aspects of institutional character. In this sense, the aim of our research is to elaborate an explanatory frame of the Internet penetration and the use of the ITC in Spain, including the territorial dimension. For it, we carry out an analysis of the variables that explain the use of Internet in feature of the urban or rural localization. An addition, the role that there have played the political authorities is analyzed. These results show the importance of reaching a high level of modernization of the Public Administrations