Editorial: Enterprise Websites Usage in the European Union - Outlook to the Western Balkans Countries

Abstract

IntroductionThe Internet usage by individuals and enterprises has become unavoidable in the contemporary society [16], [20], [21], [25], [27], especially taking into account the European Commission's Digita l Agenda [6], [28]. Therefore, it is very important for enterprises to recognize usefulness and potential benefits of being present on the Internet [22], [27]. Although many enterprises use social media and Web 2.0 tools [2], [3], [23] there are still numerous enterprises that have not decided to open their own website yet [26].There are many factors which influence the decision whether to have or not to have a website [25]. However, in this paper only variables related to the information technology (ICT) usage for e-commerce purposes (online ordering and buying), and availability of ICT infrastructure (e.g. broadband availability) were taken into account as possible determinants of the decision on the establishment of a company's website. A similar approach was used by [1], [4], [15].In the analysis, the ICT development levels (in terms of enterprise websites, e-commerce and ICT infrastructure) in selected European countries were observed, with a special focus on the following selected Western Balkans (WB) countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). Since Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Romania, and Slovenia are the EU member states, whereas Serbia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) are not, it is expected that these five EU member states have a higher ICT development level than the two named non-EU member states, which is in line with the previous research [5], [19].The paper is organized as follows. After a brief Introduction, Chapter 2 describes data and methods used in the research. In Chapter 3, results are discussed whereas in Chapter 4 conclusions are brought.in full.Data and MethodsThe data used in the analysis are extracted from the Eurostat database. The list of all selected ICT variables is given in Table 1. The percentage of enterprises having a website or homepage is determined as the dependent variable of the research, while there are also two groups of potential independent variables: e-commerce-related variables and ICT infrastructure-related variables. E-commerce-related variables measure the percentage of enterprises having purchased via computer-mediated networks and having received orders via computer-mediated networks. ICT infrastructure-related variables measure variables such as the percentage of enterprises with a broadband access (fixed or mobile). All the information is presented as the percentage of enterprises, having at least 10 employees, in a particular country in 2015. Financial sector enterprises were not included in the analysis.Data are collected for enterprises from 33 European countries, namely, for all the European Union member states (EU28), Iceland, Norway, Serbia, FYROM and Turkey. Even though the most recent data, from 2015, are collected for most of the countries, data from 2014 were used as an approximation for 2015 for Iceland, Serbia and FYROM. Similarly, because of the same reason data from 2014 were also used for the variable XPurch for Denmark and for the variable XMobBAcc for the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, the most recent data for the variable XPurch for Turkey are those for the year 2010, and this information was used as a proxy for the 2015 level, corrected by the increase in t he variable XOrder, which is available for the year 2015.First, an outlier detection and analysis is performed due to the fact that outliers could have a significant impact on the results of the analysis. The outliers were omitted from the analysis. Second, after omitting detected outliers, descriptive statistical results are provided for each variable separately. The position of the observed WB countries according to the values of the observed ICT variables is additionally examined using profile diagrams. …