Empowered by information and communication technologies (ICTs), e-commerce has radically transformed the global economic landscape over the past decade. The diffusion of e-commerce so far has mostly been limited to developed countries and has been relatively slow in the rest of the world. To alleviate the digital divide, the United Nations has sponsored research results and given financial support to help developing countries.
This dissertation applies growth theory from developmental economics and macroeconomics to analyze B2C e-commerce growth and diffusion across countries. There are two empirical studies in this dissertation. An initial exploratory study proposes three models for the growth of e-commerce revenues for European countries. An endogenous growth model proposes that e-commerce growth in a country is primary driven by internal factors. A contrasting exogenous growth model argues that e-commerce growth in a country is externally driven by leading countries. A third model, a mixed endogenous and exogenous growth model, argues that e-commerce growth is both internally and externally driven. This study tests data for 17 European countries from 2000 to 2004. The findings demonstrate that B2C e-commerce growth is driven by internal factors and external factors from a leading country, in support of the proposed explanatory growth theories.
The second empirical study further proposes a hybrid growth-theoretic embedded technology infrastructure theory to investigate the role of Internet-based technology infrastructure in affecting e-commerce growth in a country. Its main purpose is to investigate whether there are simultaneous effects between Internet-based selling technology infrastructure and e-commerce growth. The findings show that there are two-way interactions between e-commerce growth and technology infrastructure. The overall objective of this dissertation is to open up a dialogue about the efficacy of alternative theoretical perspectives that will help to align IS and e-commerce research with theoretical and methodological developments from economic research.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0213107-150104 |
| Date | 13 February 2007 |
| Creators | Ho, Shu-Chun |
| Contributors | Ting-Peng Liang, Robert J. Kauffman, Hsiangchu Lai, Ming-Hui Huang, Shin-Yuan Hung |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0213107-150104 |
| Rights | withheld, Copyright information available at source archive |
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