Identifying Obstacles to the Development of Rural Digital Economy (Case Study: Gilan Province)

The development of rural digital economy has been raised as one of the most important issues in Iran. Gilan province is also one of the regions that has been considered and investigated as one of the regions due to its potential for the development of rural digital economy. The purpose of the current research is to identify the obstacles to the development of rural digital economy in Gilan province. This research is exploratory in terms of purpose. In this research, at the beginning, the obstacles in the field of research have been extracted through the qualitative method of thematic analysis from the literature and the theoretical foundations of the research and the number of 32 semi-structured exploratory interviews about the topic. Then, using the Antropi Shannon weighting method, the structural modeling of the relationships between the components has been done. The analysis method was such that the qualitative data obtained from semi-structured interviews were analyzed in the first stage using thematic analysis method with the help of MAXQDA 2020 software, then after creating the initial codes, they were divided into more general categories. They were tied. The statistical population of the research is 91 experts and entrepreneurs, accelerators in the field of rural activities, university professors, managers and entrepreneurs with experience in digital economy. In order to select research samples and form a panel of experts, the snowball sampling method was used. In this research, theoretical saturation was reached during interviews with 32 experts. The results of the research indicate that the most important obstacles in the discussion of rural digital economy in Gilan province include things such as lack of access to appropriate technical and communication infrastructures, lack of training needed to use digital technologies, lack of effective and coordinated policies for economic development. digital, and the lack of access to financial resources and suitable credits for investment in this field.