Development of ICT in Poland in Comparison with the European Union Countries—Multivariate Statistical Analysis

The Statistics Poland defines Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as “a family of technologies that are processing, collecting and sending information in an electronic format.” The wide access to the ICT, their ceaseless expansion and extending possibilities of applicability constitute the core for the contemporary society development in Poland, Europe and all over the world. Monitoring and analyzing the changes of and in the ICT area are of great importance in both economic and social dimensions. The ICT expansion is considered to be a stimulant for various processes taking place in the modern economy, significantly affecting the innovation growth in many sectors, as well as increasing competitiveness on both micro- and macroeconomic scales. The study presents and discusses the assessment of the ICT development level in Poland against other European Union countries in the individual users and households perspective. Also, the reasons of the Internet absence at households and types of online activities were investigated. The attention was focused on the identification of subgroups of countries similar in the context of the ICT access and development in the studied societies through the considered years. The analysis was based on the Eurostat and the ITU data for years 2008–2017. The exploratory data analysis methods dealing with three-way data structures (the between and within-class principal component analysis) were applied. Factorial maps (scatterplots and biplots) were presented to summarize the results. The Hellwig method for linear ordering was used to rank the EU-28 countries due to the ICT development level.