| As the information era is coming upon us through the Internet as a successful innovation, the Internet has been perceived to be a new communication medium to exchange and gather information more fast and effectively without barriers. Furthermore, the Internet has been believed to be essential to increase national competitiveness and facilitate national economic survival among nations. At the same time, since the Internet is very capital intensive communication medium, it is believed that a nation's adaptation of the Internet is highly related with a nation's overall economic strength.; This dissertation, therefore, tried to examine what factors and barriers affect the diffusion of the Internet across 82 nations through multiple regression analysis. Then, examined bi-directional causal relationship between a nation's economic wealth and the rate of Internet diffusion for three selected nations: India, Brazil and Finland, to gain more in-depth understanding of global Internet diffusion in an economic perspective through econometrics analysis.{09}For this, three different econometrics tests: stationarity, cointegration and causality test, are performed. First, Dickey-Fuller and Augmented Dickey-Fuller tests are applied for unit root and stationarity of variables. Second, Johansen tests are applied for cointegration between variables. Finally, Granger causality test with Vector Autoregressive and Error Correction models is applied.; The multiple regression analysis indicates that nations with higher economic wealth, more educated, higher international network connected, more adequate infrastructure, less English language barrier, and more privatized policy and competitive market environment more likely to adopt the Internet earlier than others.; The stationarity test results show that the variables are integrated of order 1. That is, the tests' null hypotheses are rejected in favor of stationarity. The cointegration test provides that there is at least one cointegrating vector among each nation's level of Internet diffusion and level of economic wealth. The Granger causality test with Vector Autoregressive and Error Correction models results present that less developed nations, like India, more likely to have bi-directional causality relationship between the level of Internet diffusion and level of economic wealth than developing and developed nations. |
