The Empirical Research On The Difference Of Use Of ICT Among The Areas In China

Recently, China has experienced the period of fast expanding of ICT use, and has shrunk the gap between China and developed countries. Although ICT application level of China has improved, the gap between developed areas and undeveloped areas in China is in the trend of widening. We want to identify what factors determined the disparities of ICT use in China, and which is main determinant in the evolvement of"digital divide". We hope to try our best to avoid forming the bigger"digital divide"existed in China.The paper tries to study the difference of ICT use in provinces of China. We have examined panel data for the provinces in China over the 2001-2005 period, and explored the role of a comprehensive set of demographic, economic, institutional, and financial factors in contributing to the digital divide. The result indicates that income, telephone density; the governing of the government, legal quality, financial sector development and ratio of urban resident are associated with technology penetration rates. Estimates from Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions reveal that the main factors responsible for low rates of technology penetration rates in undeveloped areas are disparities in income, telephone density, governing of government. In terms of dynamic, we apply Gompertz model to analyze our hypothesis with estimating model with GMM. Our results indicate fairly rapid reversion to long run equilibrium for Internet use, and somewhat slower reversion for mobile phone use. Financial development is important to the growth rate of Internet use,but income can not be found having a significant impact on internet diffusion.