Digital governance and public value creation at the state level

Abstract

Digital government has been a key component on government reform strategies during the last years. Unfortunately, few research exists reporting on the impacts of electronic government in terms of the final outcomes. By using a model that links digital governance characteristics to value creation, this paper explores the impacts of electronic governance on competitiveness, government efficiency, and number of electronic transactions. We used panel data analysis to test eighteen hypotheses. Results support only one of the 18 hypotheses, and four of the hypothesis resulted statistically significant in the opposite direction. Results suggest that citizens use digital government mainly to complete electronic transactions with government. Our results also suggest that, at least at the initial stages, having two delivery channels have a negative impact on government efficiency, and against common belief, they have no impact on the competitiveness of a region. Finally, our results show that most of the value is explained by contextual variables used for control purposes. We believe that these results challenge, at least partially, some of the current guiding principles and beliefs in conducting digital governance research, and suggest the need of better theories to explain public value creation through digital governance.