On the available evidence, the countries of Southern Europe appear, for a whole variety of reasons, to be significantly behind those of Northern Europe in the uptake of teleworking and, more generally, in the development of an information economy, although there are many exceptions to this experience. As the trend for delocalisation of work across national boundaries develops, there is a real danger that these regions will be bypassed, with employers based in the highly developed, high-wage heartlands of the northern economies choosing to locate their information-processing activities not to these Mediterranean regions, but either to Eastern Europe or to regions of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean or Latin America, where costs are lower and there are substantial numbers of people who speak the languages of their former colonisers. The extent to which this threat is a real one, and the implications of these trends for economic development have not yet been explored.

This workpackage will fill the urgent need for a study which draws together the central findings of the literature on the subject, the results of past research in this area and the results of other EMERGENCE research which are relevant for these countries. Once again, it is likely that the results will also be disseminated widely by other means in addition to this report.

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