As residential Internet access in the United States shifts toward high-speed connections, a gap has emerged in rural high-speed access relative to urban high-speed access. Potential causes of this high-speed ``digital divide'' include rural—urban differences in people, place, and infrastructure. In this article, Current Population Survey data from 2000, 2001, and 2003 are combined with novel infrastructure data to determine the relative roles of these factors in the rural—urban divide. Bootstrapped decompositions of logit model results demonstrate that rural—urban differences in income and in network externalities, but not in infrastructure, are the dominant causes of the high-speed gap.
A consistent gap exists between home Internet use in metropolitan areas and in non-metropolitan areas in the U.S. This digital divide may stem from technology differences in home Internet connectivity. Alternatively, differences in education, income, and other household attributes may explain differences in metropolitan and non-metropolitan area home Internet access. Effective programs to reduce the metropolitan-non-metropolitan digital divide must be based on an understanding of the relative roles that technology and household characteristics play in determining differential Internet usage. The household Internet adoption decision is modeled using a logit estimation approach with data from the 2001 U.S. Current Population Survey Internet and Computer Use Supplement. A decomposition of separate metropolitan and non-metropolitan area estimates shows that differences in household attributes, particularly education and income, account for 63 percent of the current metropolitan-non-metropolitan digital divide. The result raises significant doubts that policies which focus solely on infrastructure and technology access will mitigate the current metropolitan-non-metropolitan digital divide. Copyright 2003 Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky..
Rural broadband infrastructure and service has received a significant amount of funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. These funds should increase broadband availability, but will broadband be used in rural areas and in particular by farmers? This paper uses Agricultural Resource Management Survey data to investigate why the majority of U.S. farmers choose not to use the Internet in their farm business. Although frequently cited by policymakers, concerns about inadequate Internet service or security actually account for a small percentage of responses. This research identifies targeted educational programs that focus on alleviating perceived barriers to Internet use.
Using 2014 U.S. nonmetropolitan county-level data, we explore the relationship between broadband speeds and business startup rates. Rural development policy discussions have presumed that access to broadband has become a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for economic growth and development.The relationship between broadband access on business startups, which are vital to local economic vibrancy, may be key to understanding the link between broadband and growth. In this study, we explore how qualitative features of broadband influence startup rates across different types of industries. To refine our insights into these relationships, we look at broadband by speed (both download and upload coverage across four speed categories). We also consider the importance of mobile broadband availability, which is often ignored in empirical studies. Because of the presence of spatial dependency within the data and the fact that data on business startup rates is limited to the minority of establishments that have employees, we use a Bayesian spatial Tobit estimator. After controlling for a host of variables likely to influence economic growth, we find that broadband coverage does matter and that download speeds tend to be more important than upload speeds. This pattern holds for mobile coverage as well. Perhaps the most important finding is that the results vary across business type: what matters for new businesses in one industry may not matter for other industry classifications. In the end, our results reaffirm the policy notion that access to broadband is increasingly relevant to rural entrepreneurship.
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