The small size of most primary sector establishments (98.5% of establishments have 2 or fewer employees) in the A.C. of the Basque Country conditions the availability of ICT–Information and Communications Technology equipment – mostly, according to Eustat data.

The percentages that primary sector establishments reach in the availability of this technology are at some distance from the rest of the sectors in the Basque economy, except in the case of mobile phones, where 30.2% of the companies in this sector have one, the level is low for the rest of basic equipment, in the use of computers (4.9%), and the availability of email (3.9%) or access to the Internet (4.1%). Companies that have a Web page, moreover, are practically inexistent, as only 0.5% are present on the web.

Table 1: Establishments by information Technology equipment according to the economic sector, employment stratum and year. (%)

Source: Eustat

However, if we take into account the size of establishments, a variable which introduces an essential element of differentiation, establishments with 10 or more employees reach considerably higher figures, between 99.3% for those with mobile phones and 47.8% for those with access to the Internet, in addition to 59.3% with email and 89.0% availability of a computer.

We can also see that if for the whole of the companies the figures for equipment reached in 2005 are very similar to those obtained in 2003, for establishments with 10 or more employees the improvement registered in this period was significant.

In the primary sector, fishing enterprises have more ICT equipment than agricultural companies

Finally, we should point out that in the primary sector the percentages obtained are very different if we separate agricultural from fishing companies, the latter reaching much higher levels of equipment. However, this data practically does not affect the total for the sector, as agricultural companies represent 99.1% of the total.

Thus, while in the agricultural sector the availability of Technology reaches very low percentages, which vary from 29.6% for mobile phones to 3.6% for email, with 4.3% in computers and 3.8% in Internet, among fishing companies these percentages rise to 91.3% for the mobile phone, 35.2% for email, 64.0% for computers and 28.2% for the Internet.

Graph 1: Establishments by ICT equipment according to activity sectors. (%)

Source: Eustat

Although we should take into account that these differences are not only due to the different social activity, but once again reflect the size of the businesses. While in the agricultural sector practically all the establishments have fewer than 10 employees, in the fishing sectors they are much more widely spread among companies with fewer than 10 employees and those with 10 or more.