The digital divide in the internet usage within enlarged European Union: a multivariate comparative analysis

In the last few years the internet has become the most important form of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Due to the fact that Poland is the largest ICT market among new EU members, the aim of this paper was to evaluate the level of internet use in Poland and other EU countries in the first year after accession in 2004. We applied multivariate comparative data analysis methods on the base of data obtained from EUROSTAT. Our studies focused on the gap between countries and their unique feature was implementation of three different linear arrangement methods. In this paper, there is also presented authors' original ranking of EU countries with respect to the internet usage. Moreover, we discovered the dependency between various rankings based on different composite indicators.