چشم انداز تئوری رشد بر رشد تجارت الکترونیک B2C در اروپا: مطالعه اکتشافی

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) continue to have a profound effect on the economies and societies where they are used. In this article, we propose three related theories to describe the underlying mechanism for growth in e-commerce revenues at the national level. Endogenous growth theory posits that the primary drivers of e-commerce growth are internal to a country. Exogenous growth theory suggests that the primary drivers of e-commerce growth are external to an economic system, and reflect the forces of the regional economy. A blend of these, a mixed endogenous–exogenous growth theory, incorporates drivers from both the economy and the region of a country. We test a number of hypotheses about e-commerce growth in the context of these theories. The key variables include Internet penetration, telecommunication investment intensity, venture capital and credit card availability, and education level. The data are drawn from 17 European countries over a five-year period from 2000 to 2004, and are analyzed using panel data regression with robust error terms, a variant of weighted least squares. The results show the differential efficacy of internal and external drivers as endogenous and exogenous precursors of e-commerce growth across the countries for a number of different modeling specifications. We conclude with a discussion of alternative approaches to model e-commerce growth in a country. The results also suggest the appropriateness of exploring models of regional contagion for e-commerce growth.

The productive capacity of societies and standard of living of nations are primarily determined by the evolution of technology, and the related information and knowledge are critical components of economic growth [17] and [89]. The emergence of Internet-based business has radically transformed the global economic and social landscape over the past decade [87]. E-commerce experienced a boom-and-bust business cycle in its transition from the dotcom bubble in 2000 and 2001 back to an economy with more modest expectations for technology-led value. More recently, it has been achieving steady growth in the global setting. The development of e-commerce and related technologies so far has mostly been limited to developed countries and has been relatively slower in the rest of the world [13], [23], [29], [35], [36] and [47]. Recent issues of the E-Commerce and Development Report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development [114] and [115] suggest that the majority of developing countries face limitations for the advancement of their digital economies. These limitations stem largely from low income levels, low literacy rates, a lack of payment systems that can support online transactions, and cultural resistance to online transaction-making. UNCTAD has proposed these constraints on cross-national e-commerce growth; however, they have not yet been examined empirically. The lack of empirical results highlights the importance of investigating macro-level factors affecting cross-national e-commerce growth. Prior studies have explored the facilitating and inhibiting factors for e-commerce growth and diffusion across countries [73], [125] and [126]. However, an appropriate theory is needed to explain the different observed levels of e-commerce growth and diffusion [67] and [128]. This research presents complementary macroeconomic growth theories for interpreting business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce growth in the cross-national context. We will explore the macro-drivers of B2C e-commerce growth across countries.3 We seek answers to the following research questions: • Is growth theory useful for investigating B2C e-commerce growth and diffusion across countries? What does it offer beyond current theories? • How do endogenous growth theory and exogenous growth theory help to organize our thinking about the mechanism for B2C e-commerce revenue growth? What new explanatory capabilities do the theories offer? • To what extent do the growth theories explain the extent to which growth is driven internally or externally across countries? Does a mixed model further inform us? This research will permit us to understand the extent to which the growth of B2C e-commerce is driven by factors that are internal or external to the countries in our data set. We specifically employ a growth theory perspective from macroeconomics and developmental economics as the basis for eliciting answers to the research questions. We map this perspective to a preliminary and exploratory empirical analysis that involves an illustration of the roles of endogenous and exogenous drivers of e-commerce growth across a set of 17 European countries. The results suggest the potential of variables such as Internet user penetration, telecommunications investment, education level, venture capital availability, and credit card penetration in support of online transaction-making in explaining B2C e-commerce growth. These vary in strength as endogenous drivers of growth when they are from the country for which growth estimation is being performed, and as exogenous drivers of growth when they are from other countries and explain the e-commerce growth of other countries. The remainder of the article is laid out as follows. Section 2 reviews the development of e-commerce across countries. In Section 3, we introduce the theories of exogenous and endogenous growth and illustrate why they are appropriate to apply to national-level e-commerce growth. In Section 4, we present research hypotheses that we will empirically test to gauge B2C e-commerce growth among 17 European countries. Section 5 lays out the variables and data sources used in this research. Section 6 presents the details of our empirical models (including modeling diagnostics, model formulation and functional form, full and reduced models) and the exploratory empirical results. We conclude in Section 7 with the contributions and limitations of this research.

The primary objective of this research has been to examine the efficacy of growth-theoretic explanations of the macro-level determinants of B2C e-commerce growth across countries. This objective is in line with Castells’ [17] call for understanding the historical and current forces at work in the global transformation to a post-industrial information economy. We positioned our exploration with respect to growth theory in economics because of the potentially new and interesting insights it offers for understanding B2C e-commerce growth. We analyzed a newly-constructed data set that includes online shopping expenditures at the country level as a means to measure B2C e-commerce revenue growth. We also proposed three theoretical models: an endogenous growth model, an exogenous growth model, and a mixed effects endogenous–exogenous growth model. The endogenous growth model states that B2C e-commerce growth in a country primarily results from internal drivers within the country. The exogenous growth model argues that B2C e-commerce growth in a country is primarily driven by external drivers from a leading country or multiple leading countries. As an exploratory step, we tested the case of one leading country, in lieu of a set of them, to capture any contagion effects that may be present. The mixed effects model posits that a blend of internal and external factors may be at work, and a key issue is the relative strength of the regional contagion effects on B2C e-commerce growth in a country. We also made a case for viewing our analysis as an assessment of contextual production, which includes output measures for B2C e-commerce growth with a set of explanatory variables that characterize the national economic environments in which such growth is observed. We were careful to contrast our methodological approach in the analysis in this article to the analysis of “true” input–output production correspondences, for which different kinds of evaluative models may be used.