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A review of some basic prerequisites for information society: Croatia in comparison to EU countries and the countries of Central and Eastern European region

Information society in general and creating prerequisites for its existence and development in particular are some of the determinants in the development strategy of Croatia. To measure and compare the readiness for and the degree of evolvement of information society in the EU member states, the European Commission has accepted a list of benchmarking indicators in line with eEurope 2005 program which offers a comparable insight in the development toward information society. Croatia has accepted this list of benchmarking indicators within the development strategy of Croatia in the field of information and communication technology (ICT), which includes directions and activities for transition into information society, and within the Operational Plan for the implementation of e-Croatia 2007 program for 2006. Since in Croatia there is still no publicly accessible systematic monitoring of these indicators, in this paper we want to explore the current position of Croatia in relation to EU and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe using information society indicators: Citizens' Internet access and usage, together with Broadband penetration. The analysis was performed on a dataset of currently available researches periodically done by market research companies and the International Telecommunication Union, as well as the data derived from Eurostat. Those data show the Internet users’ growth trends in Croatia compared to EU.

information society; Croatia’s Internet usage and penetration; broadband penetration; information society benchmarking indicators.

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