E-Government in European Countries, a Comparative Approach Using the Principal Components Analysis

Abstract

The digitalization of public administration is a necessary condition for the economic and social development of each country. In this context, e-government is developing and diversifying its forms of implementation, contributing significantly to the efficiency of public administration, to increasing the degree of transparency and to reducing corruption in public institutions. The aim of the research was to know how the states of the European Union evolved from the point of view of e-government and what influence it had on the economic development of the analyzed states and on the European citizens during the analyzed period. For this we selected ten research variables from several databases: Eurostat, the World Bank and the United Nations E-Government Development Database (UNeGovDD) of the United Nations. The period for which we did the analysis is 2010 – 2019. Using EViews 12 we applied panel Principal Component Analysis to reduce the 10-variable panel into a lower dimension of 3 principal components to find the underlying simplified structure. The three principal components retained explain about 76.5 % of the initial information. The research results show significant differences between the states analyzed, in terms of e-government, but also in terms of the impact it has on government effectiveness, controlling corruption, e-participation of European citizens and the economic development of Member States. In countries with a high level of e-government implementation, governance is efficient, corruption is low, citizen involvement is higher and economic development is faster.

Examining the white and dark sides of digitalisation effects on corruption: unveiling research patterns and insights for future research

“…Regarding quantitative approaches, researchers commonly used surveys or questionnaires (Saxena, 2018;Szopi nski and Staniewski, 2017;MacGregor Pelikanova et al, 2021;Il Park and Xiao, 2021;Iqbal and Ahmad, 2022) and various forms of regression analysis, such as panel data analysis (Uyar et al, 2021;DiRienzo et al, 2007;Dhaoui, 2022;Setor et al, 2021;Ben Ali and Gasmi, 2017;Li et al, 2021;Andersen et al, 2011;Basyal et al, 2018;Nimer et al, 2022;Androniceanu and Georgescu, 2021; Romero-Mart ınez and Garc ıa-Muiña, 2021; Khan and Krishnan, 2021;Wandaogo, 2022;Majeed, 2020;Gouvea et al, 2022) or generalised method of moments (GMM) (Mouna et al, 2020;Abbas et al, 2022). Surveys (questionnaires) were frequently used to investigate the users' perception of various digitalisation tools in curbing corruption.…”

Culture of corruption in the smart service system of global governance

“…Furthermore, the last topic cluster found is the public service system (Anttiroiko et al, 2014). This topic has strong relevance to five other indicators: political system (Ishak et al, 2020), public governance (Anttiroiko et al, 2014), public institutions (Androniceanu & Georgescu, 2021), public service (Biswas et al, 2019), and intelligent service indicators (Achilleos et al, 2019). Also, an analysis was carried out on the word cloud frequency feature on NVivo 12 Plus.…”

Decreasing Corruption and Increasing Competitiveness through E-Government

“…Digitalisation in the public sector is necessary to align with international standards and reduce corruption (Afonasova et al, 2019). According to Androniceanu & Georgescu (2021), although there are differences between European states in terms of e-government implementation and the impact of ICTs on government efficiency and economic development, the integration of ICTs in the EU public administration has significant contribution to reducing corruption. In European countries where a high level of e-government is implemented, governance is efficient; corruption is low and economic growth is faster.…”