The East–West E-Commerce Divide Among Wholesale and Retail Trade Enterprises in the European Union: The Role of Digital Demand and Internet Infrastructure

This paper investigates the factors associated with enterprise e-commerce adoption across the European Union and whether Eastern and Western Member States are converging toward a shared digital-commerce equilibrium. Focusing on firms with ten or more employees in wholesale and retail trade, we use Eurostat data for 25 EU countries observed annually from 2009 to 2024 and estimate panel regressions with country and year fixed effects. A formal specification test strongly favours a fixed-effect approach, indicating that unobserved country-specific characteristics are correlated with the included regressors. Once country differences and common time trends are controlled for, income per capita is the only statistically significant correlate in the preferred specification, while individual online-shopping rates and household internet access lose explanatory power. Cross-country dispersion in adoption rates has widened over the period, despite faster percentage growth among countries starting from lower levels. No statistically significant difference is identified between Eastern and Western countries in the estimated relationship between consumer demand and enterprise e-commerce adoption, and the East–West gap narrowed only modestly, from roughly seven percentage points in 2009 to under six in 2024. The findings suggest that broader economic conditions may remain more closely associated with closing the gap than further increases in already widespread household connectivity alone.