INVESTIGATION INTO THE CAUSES OF THE DIGITAL DIVIDE BETWEEN URBAN AND RURAL POPULATION OF RUSSIA
In present day conditions of digital economy development, the rural population faces great difficulties, as information and communication technologies penetrate into the countryside with a noticeable delay. The authors discussed indicators characterizing the level of Internet access, the degree personal computers and mobile devices usage, the availability of digital skills and the use of electronic public and municipal services by urban and rural population of Russia, reflecting the presence of digital inequality. By all indicators, the urban population more actively use digital technology means. Traditional agriculture does not require the use of information and communication technologies in making management decisions, however, digital transformation of agricultural production will require significant transformation costs in the nearest future, which will increase the competitiveness of rural areas, therefore, it becomes extremely important to train rural residents in farming and interaction with authorities using various digital products. Based on the data of a sociological survey conducted in 2020, it was revealed that the main reasons for the low popularity of electronic interaction between the rural population and the authorities are the low level of computer literacy (32.2% of respondents), technical restrictions on access to the network (29.9%), as well as the low level of awareness of the rural population about the possibilities of such interaction (27.4%). The authors propose an integral indicator for assessing the digital gap between the urban and rural population, which is the sum of the differences in individual indicators of the use of information and communication technologies by the urban and rural population of the Russian Federation. The results are of practical importance for the implementation of existing digital divide coping mechanisms.