The co-evolution of ICT, skills and organization in public administrations: Evidence from new European country-level data

During the past two decades a big effort has been made in exploring the complementarities between information and communications technology (ICT) adoption, investment in human capital and organizational change, and how these affect economic performance. Such investigations, however, remain substantially circumscribed to private sectors, while the role of these factors in public sector performance has been largely disregarded.In this paper we aim at filling this gap in empirical literature by combining different data-sources and constructing a panel of comparable data about output quality, input costs, ICT investments, skills and organizational changes in public administrations of 16 European countries. We propose an index-based approach to the measurement of PA performance relying on the adoption of public e-services as a proxy of revealed output quality, and provide an econometric analysis of how the co-evolution of ICT, skills and organizational factors affects government effectiveness. © 2013.