The growing digital divide in Europe and the United States

Désirée Rückert, Reinhilde Veugelers and Christoph Weiss

No 654659, Working Papers of Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven

Abstract: Using a new survey on digitalisation activities of firms in the EU and the US, we identify digitalisation profiles based on the current use of digital technologies and future investment plans in digitalisation. Our analysis confirms the trend toward digital polarisation and a growing digital divide in the corporate landscape with, on one side, many firms that are not digitally active, and on the other side, a substantial number of digitally active firms forging ahead. Old small firms, with less than 50 employees and more than 10 years old, are significantly more likely to be persistently digitally non-active. We show that these persistently non-digital firms are less likely to be innovative, increase employment or command higher mark-ups. These trends are likely to exacerbate the digital divide across firms in the EU and the US.

Keywords: digital technology; investment; firm performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23
Date: 2020-05-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-eur, nep-knm, nep-pay, nep-reg, nep-sbm and nep-tid
Note: paper number MSI_2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in FEB Research Report MSI_2007, pages 1-23

Downloads: (external link)
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/576180 Published version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The growing digital divide in Europe and the United States (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ete:msiper:654659

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven
Bibliographic data for series maintained by library EBIB ().