Investigating the Next Level Digital Divide in Indonesia

This study aims to investigate the ICT skills inequality, also known as the second-level digital divide, among the population in all provinces in Indonesia. The inequality is measured relative to those who reside in Jakarta City. We group ICT skills into four, namely data and information literacy, communication and collaboration, software, and problem-solving. Data collection is administered by the human resources research and development agency of MCI through a nationwide survey. We utilize ordinal logistic regression as the estimation method. The results show that the people who live in around half of the whole provinces in Indonesia have lower odds of having more ICT skills relative to those in DKI Jakarta. The study also found that seven provinces are lower in the four ICT skill groups. As expected, most of them located in eastern Indonesia. These findings are expected to be a consideration in developing strategies to improve ICT skills in each province in Indonesia so that they are more targeted, effective, and efficient.