Digital Readiness and E-Commerce Adoption in the European Union: Within-Country Associations and Convergence Patterns (2020–2025)

Abstract

This study examines digital readiness and e-commerce participation across the EU-27 during 2020–2025, combining common-sample two-way fixed-effects models for 2020–2024, one-year-lagged specifications, first-difference and post-break sensitivity analyses, and convergence tests. Household internet access shows the most stable contemporaneous within-country association: in the preferred specification, a one-percentage-point increase in the national access rate is associated with approximately 0.82 percentage points higher online-purchasing participation. The result remains significant under country-specific trends, restricted wild-cluster bootstrap inference, fractional-response models, and first differences, but not in the one-year-lagged models. ICT-specialist employment, treated as an exploratory indicator of national digital-ecosystem capacity, is not statistically significant, including in the post-2021 sensitivity sample; the GDP relationship is also not robust. Sigma-convergence evidence is stronger: in a balanced 26-country sample, the cross-country standard deviation falls from 15.39 percentage points in 2020 to 11.64 in 2025, and the coefficient of variation falls from 0.244 to 0.159, with country-trajectory bootstrap intervals for both the change and the trend remaining below zero. The conventional beta-convergence estimate is negative and significant (β = −0.0998, p < 0.001) but becomes insignificant in ceiling-sensitive logit and headroom-adjusted specifications. The findings therefore support a robust contemporaneous association between basic digital access and e-commerce participation and statistically validated short-run sigma convergence, while beta catch-up remains specification-sensitive.