Received:
2024-03-11 | Accepted:
2024-06-30 | Published:
2024-09-30
Title
Intersectional digital inequality in Indonesia
Abstract
Indonesia is an emerging economy with a fast-growing digital sector. However, the development is not uniform across the country, with wide gaps related to regional differences and personal characteristics. This paper analyses the digital gap in Indonesia in the intersectional framework. I consider several metrics, such as the ratio of the population accessing the Internet, villages receiving mobile internet signal, and telecommunication expenditures. The study spans five years, from 2018 to 2022 (with some years missing for some of the variables). The data comes from BPS-Statistics Indonesia 2022 report "Telecommunication Statistics in Indonesia". I compute the Equality Ratios for one-dimensional and intersectional inequality as the value of the digitalisation metric for the most underprivileged group divided by the value for the most privileged group. Then, I assess the intersectional surplus as the difference between the inequality experienced by the intersectional group and the combination of one-dimensional inequalities. There is a substantial gap in internet usage and mobile internet availability in Indonesia, mostly related to urban/rural division and disparities between provinces. On the contrary, the gender gap is minimal. I also find no inequality in telecommunication expenditures. The gaps in internet usage were converging in recent years, but this was not true for the gaps in internet availability. People in intersectional groups face the combination of one-dimensional inequalities, but in most cases, there are none or minimal surplus effects.
Keywords
digitalisation, digital divide, intersectional inequality, Indonesia
JEL classifications
D63
, O18
, O53
URI
http://jssidoi.org/ird/article/167
DOI
Pages
11-22
Funding
Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
This is an open access issue and all published articles are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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