Critical factors of e-commerce development
This paper analyses the factors affecting the development of e-commerce. Based on an analysis of scientific sources, the following factors and indicators reflecting them have been chosen for the quantitative analysis of the impact of external environment factors: technological factors – Internet access, the demographic structure of the population, namely, ratio of women to men in the population, ratio of working-age to non-working-age population, computer and Internet literacy of the population; economic factors – GDP, the employment rate, minimum wage and consumption expenditure per capita. The correlation analysis performed on the basis of the EU-27 data shows the highest correlation coefficients between the volume of e-commerce and the Internet usage, computer and Internet literacy, employment rate and the minimum wage. A strong relationship is also between the scale of e-commerce and the integrated Networked Readiness Index as well as the favourability of the ICT environment in a specific country.
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