The privatization of water services is a basic conditionality in the structural adjustment programs imposed by international financial institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, on indebted countries. In the same sense, the financial assistance that has been offered to Greece from Troika, since the beginning of the financial crisis, in the late 2009, was accompanied by the commitment, to privatize, among others, the two largest public water companies. The consequences of water privatization policies include increases in prices, poor quality of services, little or no investment, rise of income inequality, high levels of corruption, loss of jobs and deterioration of working conditions. Despite the fact that privatization of water supply companies has been proven to be ineffective in many parts of the world and the tendency towards the remunicipalization of water services that has lately been detected, international financial organizations continue to set water privatization as conditionality. The unconstitutionality of the policy and the strong opposition of citizens and unions to water privatization seem to be inefficient to prevent the Greek government to proceed to the establishment of a public-private partnership in the water supply sector.

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In the past, a number of methodologies and approaches have been created to evaluate the development of e-Government and the public sector's digital transformation. Numerous e-Government maturity models have been created to close this gap. The variety of models, though, has come under criticism from several academics. The purpose of this research is to examine whether e-Government maturity models can still be regarded as relevant through the examination of 39 e-Government maturity models that have been established throughout the year. The results indicate that due to the numerous internal and external relevant inflectional factors that have not been taken into consideration by the models under study, e-Government maturity models have a limited ability to represent the growth of e-Government.

Several e‐Government maturity models have been developed throughout the years to assess the progress of e‐Government. This diversity of models has drawn some criticism in terms of their similarity, oversimplicity, one‐sided view and the characteristics incorporated in their stages. The goal of this study is to explore if a simple e‐Government maturity model can capture e‐Government progress and if operations can be classified into phases to give a realistic view of e‐Government. An adapted version of the United Nations e‐Government maturity model was used to assess the portals of the 50 largest municipalities of Greece. The factors influencing the e‐Government maturity development are examined through ordinal regression. The findings suggest that e‐Government maturity models have limited ability to capture the e‐Government development as it may not be considered linear. Municipal authorities have taken steps towards e‐Government, however, they are missing functionalities that are at the core of digital transformation. Finally, the findings indicate, that factors such as population, political ideology of the ruling party, budget and the mayor's gender have limited role in predicting the e‐Government maturity in the cases examined.

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