Towards synthetic and balanced digital government benchmarking

Abstract

Reliable benchmarking is essential for effective management of the government digitalization efforts. Existing benchmarking instruments generally fail to support this target. One problem is the diversity of instruments, resulting in a split image of digital progress and adding ambiguity to policy decisions. Another problem is disconnect in assessing progress between digital and traditional “analog” governance, lending support to a dangerous idea that countries can compensate for lack of progress in their governance systems by simply digitalizing them. This paper provides a path to addressing both problems by: aggregating relevant indicators of the World Economic Forum's Network Readiness Index (NRI) to obtain a single synthetic measure of digital government, balancing this measure with progress in analog governance using World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), calculating new measures for the latest editions of NRI and WGI, and discussing results. Technically, the paper applies multidimensional linear ordering and factor analysis.