THE INFLUENCE OF INTERNET ACCESS ON THE EMPLOYMENT RATE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION AND IN THE E.F.T.A.

In the context of the acceleration of the digital development in the current society, we can state that access to information is one of the most important factors in forming the work force. In the present paper, we will present a way of quantifying the influence of the internet access on the employment rate for the second level of the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (N.U.T.S. 2) of several countries that are members of the European Union (E.U.) and the European Free Trade Association (E.F.T.A.), by using a G.M.M. vector autoregressive model with panel data. This study is important due to the way it connects the employment rate with the internet access rate for the several countries of the E.U. and E.F.T.A. because it offers an overview of how improving the internet access can lead to an increase in the employment rate of the general population. The countries used in the present study are: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Spain, Croatia, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania and Sweden for the time period between 2010 and 2020. The study leads to the conclusion that increasing the percentage of internet users in the total population has a significant influence on the employment rate for the analysed countries, when taking into account N.U.T.S. 2 regions.