Does electronic government deter corruption? Evidence from across the world

Abstract

Electronic government innovations are one of the most important changes in public administration in recent years. Governments in many countries have implemented e-government policies to foster efficiency and transparency, and to mitigate corruption. This paper explores the effects of e-government on corruption using longitudinal data for more than 170 countries for the period 2002-2017. Empirical results strongly support the hypothesis that e-government can be used to deter corruption. This result is robust to alternative indicators of corruption and e-government, as well as to a variety of estimation techniques. A novelty of our research is that we analyse under which conditions is e-government more effective in reducing corruption. Quantile regressions indicate that the potential of e-government to deter corruption is higher between quantiles 0.3 to 0.8 of the corruption distribution. E-government also reveals to be a more effective corruption deterrent in countries that are not classified as high-income countries and that are not in the extremes of the freedom of the press variable distribution.