Impact of Covid-19 on e-Commerce in the European Union

Timothy Yaw Acheampong

A chapter in Proceedings of the ENTRENOVA - ENTerprise REsearch InNOVAtion Conference, Hybrid Conference, Zagreb, Croatia, 9-10 September 2021, 2021, pp 86-95 from IRENET - Society for Advancing Innovation and Research in Economy, Zagreb

Abstract: The advent of the 4th Industrial Revolution has made it inevitable for firms worldwide to modify their business models to integrate ICTs into their operations. The lockdown measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic appear to have accelerated this process as many businesses, particularly in the hospitality industry, had to shut down their operations. Others also had to resort to conducting their businesses solely online. Thus, it has been argued that e-commerce has thrived during the lockdown period. Concentrating on the current 27 European Union (EU) member countries, this paper seeks to answer the following question: To what extent the COVID-19 impacted e-commerce has? Trend analyses and a paired samples t-test are used to compare the mean percentage of enterprises with e-commerce sales before the pandemic and the first year. The study finds a significant increase in the percentage of enterprises that made e-commerce sales during the first year of the pandemic compared to the previous year (t=-2.06; df=25). Except for the western EU member countries, all other regions increased the percentage of enterprises that made e-commerce sales, with the southern EU countries witnessing the highest increase.

Keywords: 4th Industrial Revolutio; COVID-19; e-commerce; European Union; digital divide (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F6 M15 M16 O33 O54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/262237/1/09-ENT-2021.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:entr21:262237

DOI: 10.54820/VPRD4547

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Proceedings of the ENTRENOVA - ENTerprise REsearch InNOVAtion Conference (2021), Hybrid Conference, Zagreb, Croatia from IRENET - Society for Advancing Innovation and Research in Economy, Zagreb
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().