Does Digital Technology Improve Governance?
Governments invest billions of dollars annually in automating government financial management, customs, and tax systems respectively. But aside from a few cases that are repeatedly quoted, there is little rigorous evidence of the impact of these investments on government efficiency and accountability to deliver services, reports Zahid Hussain, Lead Economist, South Asia Finance and Poverty group, for the World Economic Forum.
“An examination of the roughly 530 e-government projects funded by the World Bank in the past twenty years, for example, reveal that almost a third are unsatisfactory, and perform worse than a typical project,” the report says.
The conclusion is that digital technologies can indeed be transformative; but only if accompanied by “analog complements,” Hussain writes.
