eGovernment country comparison

The EU Commission’s Directorate General (DG) CONNECT has published its 200-page report ‘eGoverment Benchmark 2018’. The DG has also created a special webpage with an overview, graphics and summaries. The report was prepared on behalf of the European Commission by the consultancy companies Capgemini, Sogeti and IDC in conjunction with the Politecnico di Milano University.

The study looked at various life events in which citizens want or need to use services provided by national authorities in order to investigate whether and how they can be carried out electronically. These were: moving, finding a job, starting a business and studying. Several benchmarks were used for each of these, including the issue of cross-border mobility.

For companies, the life event ‘regular business operations’ was used. The services investigated included transferring social contributions as well as reporting employee illness to the authorised administration and requesting compensation for wages for the ill employee. Again, the study first looked at each individual country and then subsequently used the cross-border benchmark.

Other sub-indicators included online availability, in particular access via mobile devices; transparency of administrative procedures; secure identification of users by means of electronic identification (eID); and the authentic transmission of documents or files between parties.

In Germany, the preferred eID is the German identity card, which was introduced some years ago. It can provide the same proof of identity on the Internet as it does as a visual document outside of the Internet. Users can identify themselves clearly and authentically to third parties (public or private). Since 2017, all identity cards have been provided with the eID function switched on as standard, and not deactivated, if the owner is 16 years or older at the time of application (Act on Identity Cards and Electronic Identification, Section 10). 

Overall, the countries to receive the ‘best’ score in the benchmarking were: Malta, Austria, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Portugal, Denmark and Norway. Countries with a below-average score for eGovernment services were: Belgium, Italy, the Czech Republic, Cyprus and Germany.