Digital inequality between urban and rural population

Digitalization can transform social inequality between urban and rural population into a digital divide. This issue in the “city-village” context is not given due attention by scholars and is mainly limited to the country level. Interregional inequality in scientific publications is considered, as a rule, outside of this context. The study seeks to eliminate this gap. The aim is to identify features, trends and quantitative parameters of digital inequality (divide) between urban and rural population at the national and interregional level and identify ways to address the issues that arise. The tasks are to establish trends in the formation of a digital divide in the levels of Internet access and digital competence of users, in obtaining state and municipal services and ordering goods/services; to assess the reasons for the rural population's refusal to use the Internet and identify ways to solve this problem. The study was based on a combination of calculation of coefficients ofvariation and grouping of regions. We used the data of the federal statistical observation.