E-Government: A Driving Factor For Stimulating Innovation Performance In Romania?

The development of public services is one of the priorities on the agendas of all policies, both national and European. One of the most recent concerns of the European Commission, as shown in the 2010 Innobarometer, is to find ways and develop strategies to support the innovation in the public administration sector, in the context of the continuously changing economic background. In this paper, we'll investigate the relationship between e-Government, and the overall innovation performance at national level, for some European Union countries. e-Government is already a known concept, widespread in the world, promoting the implementation of information and communication technologies in the public administration, in order to provide better public services to citizens and businesses. A main component of the e-Government concept is the "counter reform", aimed to streamlining administrative act quickly in order to respond to the demands of citizens, businesses and government structures. Innovation in e-Government will be measured with two Eurostat indicators - "e-Government on-line availability" and "e-Government usage by individuals" - while for the overall innovation performance we'll use a composite indicator - the Summary Innovation Index (SII) - from the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS). In Romania, even if the values of these indicators are not at the level of other EU countries, we can say that the situation has improved and electronic public services are being used increasingly often. The study also includes a comparison between two "modest innovators": Romania and Bulgaria. Regarding the overall innovation performance, according to the 2010 Innovation Union Scoreboard ranking, Romania is the leader of the "modest innovators" countries, overcoming Latvia, Bulgaria and Lithuania. However, in the field of e-Government our country has major shortcomings. Romania has registered a significant progress in the years after the EU integration, followed by a setback in 2009, still having values below those of other EU countries, including Bulgaria.