| Abstract: |
The paper, mostly empirical in nature, investigates issues on cross-national
new information and communication technologies (ICTs) adoption patterns and
growth directions. In the period of 2000-2010, a great number of countries
underwent substantial changes on the field of ICTs implementation. Many of
them made a great “jump” starting with almost “zero level” of ICTs adoption in
year 2000, and during the 10 – year period were implementing ICTs at
astonishingly high pace. Despite the obvious positive impact that ICTs have on
overall society and economy condition, rapid changes can also generate higher
inequalities on the field. The paper focuses mainly on capturing these
changes. It also aims to confirm or reject the hypothesis on growing
inter-country inequalities in ICTs adoption. The target of the paper is
twofold. Firstly, we explain the magnitude of past and present differences in
digitalization level among countries; secondly, we concentrate digital
technology convergence. We apply three approaches to convergence –
beta-convergence, sigma-convergence and quantile-convergence (q-convergence),
to check if relative division between countries was growing or diminishing in
the time span 2000-2010. Additionally we check if countries of the given
sample tend to form convergence clubs in the relevant years. The analysis is
run for the sample consisted of 145 economies and the time coverage is
2000-2010. All data applied in the research are drawn from the International
Telecommunication Union statistical databases. |