The local digital divide in Spain: a territorial analysis of the Internet penetration in the Spanish households

Paper submitted to the Regional Studies Association International Conference, “Regions: The Dilemmas of Integration and Competition”, Prague, 27th-29th May 2008.The digital divide that it is affecting to rich and poor countries, is also manifested inside the countries, among local and rural areas. The use of the new technologies could cause that as much the inhabitants as the enterprises of the rural areas had the same means and opportunities that in the big cities; the use of Internet and the e-labour could increase the dynamism of the rural areas and to compensate the important delocalization problem. But it is evident that the digital divide persists, and the access to the ITC increases the differences between the urban and the rural areas. In this sense, the aim of this research is to elaborate an explanatory frame of the penetration of Internet in Spain, incorporating the territorial dimension, given the shortage of existing evidence in the local scope. For it, after the introduction, in the second section we carry out an analysis of the variables that influence in the penetration of Internet in feature of the urban or rural localization of the households starting from the data corresponding to the “Survey on Equipment and Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Households” of Spanish Statistical Institute (SSI). The tabulation of these micro-data will allow us to elaborate explanatory models of the penetration of Internet in the Spanish households. Firstly, we elaborate an exploratory analysis based on cross-tabs with statistical tests. Secondly, this research contributes to the literature by explaining the level of ICT (internet) adoption through a logit-model with several variables: income, demographical variables, human capital and location of users (urban versus rural areas). In the third section, we carry out a revision of the role that the different governments are playing in the design of the appropriate policies to push the Society of the Information. Lastly, the paper concludes with the principal conclusions