Digital State Capacity

Digital State Capacity is the ability of governments to deploy ICT infrastructure and information systems to implement policy. This paper introduces a new measure of government ICT capacity based on an observable stock of deployable public-sector network infrastructure: public IPv4 address space held by government organisations. These address holdings are key inputs into digital administration because they support internet-facing systems, networked information exchange, and coordination across agencies and functions. The core panel covers approximately 150,000 country-entity records classified as government across more than 150 countries from 2019 to 2024 and can be disaggregated by administrative level and government function. In the 2019 to 2024 Admin-1 panel, government IP holdings are observed in 1,681 subnational regions across all years. We validate the measure at the cross-country and subnational levels and apply it to government tasks related to corruption control and vaccination rollout. In illustrative country-year analysis, higher Digital State Capacity is associated with higher-quality governance and public-service outcomes in the expected directions, including lower measured corruption and higher vaccination coverage. These associations are descriptive; they demonstrate the empirical relevance of the measure and are not causal estimates.