Digital Literacy and Digital Inclusion by Kim M. Thompson

Author:Kim M. Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Netherlands

The Kingdom of the Netherlands is a constitutional and hereditary monarchy with central executive power resting with the crown and central legislative power jointly shared by the crown and parliament. The nation hosts a population of 16,788,119 (Statistics Netherlands, 2013), and a GDP per capita of USD$46,054 (World Bank, 2013b), with an adult literacy rate measured at higher than 99 percent (Turner, 2012). More than 80 percent of the country’s inhabitants are native Dutch, with immigrants coming primarily from other EU countries (5 percent), Indonesia (2.4 percent), Turkey (2.2 percent), Suriname (2 percent), Morocco (2 percent), and the Caribbean (0.8 percent) (Central Intelligence Agency, 2013). There are two official languages, Dutch and Frisian; however English-language education has been prominent in the Netherlands since the 1980s (Dronkers, 1993), and English is a compulsory foreign language requirement in the Dutch primary curriculum (National Center on Education and the Economy, 2012a).

The Netherlands has been liberalizing its communication infrastructure since the 1980s beginning with the privatization of the national telephone industry. In 1994, the government set up an Action Programme, developed through consultation with the private sector, in which it was decreed that by 1998, regulations and incentives should be developed for private investors to be engaged in rapid development in information technology. It was also planned that if the private sector had not engaged by then, the government would consider greater involvement in investment and development of information technology (Mansell, Davies, & Hulsink, 1996). The Dutch Telecommunications Act was passed in 1998, addressing regulations regarding the liberalization of the telecommunication industry (the act was amended in 2012 to address net neutrality, the principle that the Internet should remain free and open) and privacy issues.

The Netherlands ranks in sixth place on the ITU IDI, after South Korea and the four Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland. However, the European Commission has created a separate series of indices to chart digital development in the 27 current European Union (EU27) countries and assess factors that affect digital inclusion there. Researchers have created the compound European Digital Development Index (EDDI), made up of three component indices, namely:

The Internet Usage Index, which describes autonomy, intensity, and skills related to Internet use

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