The Rural-Urban "Digital Divide" in New Zealand Progress Since September 2000

Abstract

The purpose of our study is to provide some additional data to increase understanding of any potential New Zealand geographical differences in business use of the Internet. Consistent with the definition of electronic commerce used in both the MED/BRC and ISCR studies we define "business use of the internet" to be any business use to which the Internet is put thus including both transactions of information (email advertising web-based searches) and buying and selling (business to business and business to consumer) exchanges. To distinguish between the bases of urban and rural used in other studies we define "metropolitan" to be the four main cities in New Zealand: Auckland Wellington Christchurch and Dunedin. "Provincial" centres are defined to be the principal towns in each of the 14 districts defined in the Telecom Yellow Pages data excluding the "metropolitan" centres while "rural" is defined as the rural hinterland surrounding each provincial centre in each of the regions17. Where "urban" is used this encompasses both metropolitan and provincial centre classifications.