Digital transformations of public administration in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: EU countries case study

The digital transformation of public administration and public services has become an urgent need for many governments around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the approach to digitization, so this article aims to explore the homogeneity and pace of digital transformation of public administration through the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and to identify problems and forecasts of research processes at the EU level. The method of cluster analysis was used to study the similarity of the digital transformation of public administration in the EU. The pace of digitalization of public administration in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic was studied through trend analysis. The results show that the EU countries according to the level of public administration digitalization, are grouped into five clusters, between which there are significant digital gaps. The gaps have widened under the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which could affect the overall strategy of digitalization of society and the formation of e-government in the EU. It has been proven that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace of digitalization in the EU, as the actual number of users of electronic public services in 2020-2021 exceeds the forecast, based on the 2009-2019 trend analysis. The proposed technique can be used to predict the level of digitization of any country or group of countries.