How advanced are Italian regions in terms of public e-services? The construction of a composite indicator to analyze patterns of innovation diffusion in the public sector

•A “constrained” DEA for a composite indicator on diffusion of ICT in the public sector across Italian regions is applied.•Constraints to the DEA are obtained by a previous Budget Allocation (BA) – through a questionnaire administered to experts.•Four domains of e-services (namely, e-education, e-government, e-transportation and e-health) are examined at once.•Results show that some regions have more a balanced approach to public e-service development while others focus on specific domains.•Uncertainty analysis on the composite indicator highlights robustness of results and heterogeneity implies the need for regional differentiation of policies.

This paper applies an open and transparent methodology to construct a composite indicator for the analysis of the diffusion of ICT in the public sector and the development of public e-services across Italian regions. This methodology, based on OECD/EC-JRC Handbook and incorporating experts′ opinion into a Data Envelopment Analysis, will allow us to define a ranking of Italian regions in terms of ICT adoption and of e-service development. Data are obtained by merging four different surveys carried out by Between Co. (2010–2011) and Istat – Italy′s National Bureau of Statistics (2009). We add to extant empirical literature in three ways. First, we offer a comprehensive measurement of advances in digital government that is not circumscribed to a single domain (e.g. administrative procedures of public administrations) but is rather aimed to capture a wide spectrum of public e-services (e-government, e-education, Intelligent Transport Systems, e-health). Second, we tackle a major drawback of existing statistics and benchmarking studies which are largely based on the count of services provided online, by including more sophisticated indicators on the quality of services offered and on back office changes. The results – both in terms of scores and regional rankings – highlight the presence of different patterns of adoption and use of public e-services at the local level. Third, we offer a rich account of the extreme heterogeneity of public e-service development and of the underlying technological and organizational change at the sub-national level, and hence provide a basis for the differentiating policy measures across regions.