Regional development and the information society: How Greek regions measure up in the information age?

Abstract

It is widely accepted that the Information Society (IS) offers great potential in promoting sustainable development, democracy, accountability and good governance. Full exploitation of the new opportunities provided by ICTs should be an important part of any strategy aimed at achieving development goals. Greece is a regional country in the EU and some of the Greek regions are amongst the least developed within the Union. Therefore, the importance of the Information Society, with regard to regional development in Greece, becomes greater as it provides an opportunity for Greek regions to catch up. The aim of this chapter is to identify the main trends and problems of the Information Society in Greek regions, evaluate regional strategies and measures and discover threats and opportunities for the future development of Greek regions. As the development of IS seems to be a key point in the success of regional development policies, the importance of careful and appropriate planning becomes imperative. As available data shows, the development of the Information Society in Greek regions does not seem to follow a specific pattern. With the exception of the region of Attiki, there are no regions that systematically perform better or worse. An attempt to discover correlations with non-IS indicators (such as economic, employment or R&D indicators), shows that no such correlations exist. Until recently, regions in Greece did not have separate strategies regarding IS development. However, since 2002, each region has been given funding to develop its own Operational Plan for the Information Society. These Regional Operational Plans, which provided the means for all Regional Administrations to determine region-specific goals and aims for the development of the Information Society at the regional level, form a basis for a comparative analysis of the Greek regions.