The co-evolution of ICT, skills and organization in publicadministrations: Evidence from new European country-leveldata

During the past two decades a big effort has been made in exploring the complementar-ities between information and communications technology (ICT) adoption, investment inhuman capital and organizational change, and how these affect economic performance.Such investigations, however, remain substantially circumscribed to private sectors, whilethe 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, ICTinvestments, skills and organizational changes in public administrations of 16 Europeancountries. We propose an index-based approach to the measurement of PA performancerelying on the adoption of public e-services as a proxy of revealed output quality, andprovide an econometric analysis of how the co-evolution of ICT, skills and organizationalfactors affects government effectiveness.