Amoedo, José ManuelBlanco Varela, BrunoCampos Romero, Hugo2026-01-162026-01-162025-05-08Amoedo, J. M., Blanco-Varela, B., & Campos-Romero, H. (2025). Information and communication technologies and the COVID-19: from economic inequality to educational digital divide in central and South America. Information Technology for Development, 31(4), 1459–1480. https://doi.org/10.1080/02681102.2025.25024061554-0170https://hdl.handle.net/10347/45221This is an original manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Information Technology for Development on 2025/05/08, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02681102.2025.2502406During the pandemic, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education gained significance due to the closure of educational institutions. Therefore, the gap in educational performance between students with access to ICT and those without access to them may have widened. This paper analyzes whether the educational digital divide caused by access to ICT has increased in eight countries in Central and South America. Propensity Score Matching is employed to estimate the effect of access to ICT on educational performance considering students’ socioeconomic background, eliminating the effect of other pre-existing inequalities using data from PISA (2018 and 2022 editions). The results indicate that the educational digital divide generated by unequal access to ICT has widened during the pandemic. However, outcomes vary depending on the country and the assessed competence. These findings underline the need to keep debating the impact of unequal access to ICT on educational systems, especially in developing countriesengAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Educational digital divideEducational inequalitiesCOVID-19Academic performanceInformation and communication technologiesCentral and South Americajournal article10.1080/02681102.2025.2502406open access