Full length article The education-related digital divide: An analysis for the EU-28 Frederico Cruz-Jesus a, * , María Rosalía Vicente b , Fernando Bacao a , Tiago Oliveira a a NOVA, Information Management School, Campus de Campolide, 1070-312 Lisboa, Portugal b Applied Economics, University of Oviedo, 33006 Oviedo, Spain article info Article history: Received 13 July 2015 Received in revised form 21 October 2015 Accepted 15 November 2015 Available online xxx Keywords: Digital divide Digital development ICT Education Digital agenda European union abstract This paper addresses the international and internal digital divides that exist across and within the Eu- ropean member states according to the educational attainment of their populations. Our results suggest that even for those European countries that are outperforming their counterparts in terms of digital development, such as Finland, some internal gaps still remain and need to be addressed. In other countries, as in the cases of Malta, Spain, and Portugal, the divides are a matter for concern. These findings would probably be overlooked if we worked only with aggregate levels, as is usual. Conse- quently, this paper draws attention to the importance of complementing cross-country analysis of the digital divide with an assessment of internal gaps. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Although information and communication technologies (ICT) are today profoundly intertwined with almost every aspect of economic and social activities, they still continue to hold the promise of tremendous innovation and development opportu- nities, provided that the right enabling conditions are put into place (European Commission, 2013). The conviction that greater adoption and use of ICT will foster growth and development, trumping the present economic difficulties, has been supported by some leading nations and world organizations (European Commission, 2010a, 2010b; National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council, 1996; OECD, 2011; Unesco, 2009; US Department of Commerce, 2000, 2002). At the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), sponsored by the United Nations (UN), it was declared that the global challenge for the new millennium is to build a society “where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life” (WSIS, 2003, 2005). In this context, the existence of the digital inequalities both between and within countries, poses a major threat to the fulfil- ment of ICT potential. The digital divide has been defined as “the gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographic areas at different socio-economic levels with regard both to their opportu- nities to access ICT and to their use of the Internet for a wide variety of activities.” (OECD, 2001). There have been multiple efforts to quantify/measure the in- ternational digital divide, that is, the digital gap across countries (Cruz-Jesus, Oliveira, & Bacao, 2012; Cuervo & Men endez, 2006; Dewan, Ganley, & Kraemer, 2005). However, these efforts have generally neglected the fact that within each country there might also be digital inequalities related to population's socio-economic imbalances. Research on digital divide has shown that several socio-economic factors lead to asymmetries in ICT adoption and use between individuals: income, age, and educational attainment, among others (Dewan & Riggins, 2005). Education, in particular, reveals itself as an extremely important factor because, not only are more educated individuals more likely to have less difficulty coping with technology's complexity (Rogers, 2005), but they will also most likely be exposed to ICT in their professional and personal lives. This paper focuses on measuring the education-related digital divide, i.e., the digital gap between countries, controlling for the level of education of their population, which is to say, the digital asymmetries that may exist in each country due to differences in education level of the country's population. The context of our study is the European Union (EU), which is * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: fjesus@novaims.unl.pt (F. Cruz-Jesus), mrosalia@uniovi.es (M.R. Vicente), bacao@novaims.unl.pt (F. Bacao), toliveira@novaims.unl.pt (T. Oliveira). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computers in Human Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.11.027 0747-5632/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Computers in Human Behavior 56 (2016) 72e82