Exploring the role of ICT, skills and organizational change in public sector performance

The lack of research on the links between ICT, organizational change, skill structure, and performance of the public sector is due inter alia to the conceptual and analytical problems encountered when estimating output for non-market sectors. Moreover, proper proxies of skill composition and organizational change are even harder to obtain for PAs than for private sectors. The result is that scant attention has been devoted to the investigation of the ICT effects on Public Administration (PA) productivity, or to the accompanying changes taking place among the organizational structures and skills composition of PAs. Recent research has indeed highlighted different aspects of the complementarity puzzle in the case of PAs. This effort is reflected in the more comprehensive measures of public sector performance that account for the quality of inputs or innovativeness of outputs. Moreover, there is a growing number of qualitative and quantitative analyses of the complexities of ICT adoption in public organizations. Going deeper along this line has also led to explicit evaluation of the co-evolution of ICTs, skills and organization and their effect on public sector productivity, thus helping explore the specificities of the Solow paradox in the case of PAs. This paper accounts for such developments and offers some insights on the conceptual and empirical issues that are raised when moving in this direction of research.