Degree of eGovernment Development and Level of Informal Economy - A Nudge from the Covid-19 Pandemic?

Abstract

Across the whole world, more than half of the global workforce have their main employment in the informal economy. EU member state factsheets suggest that undeclared work in its various manifestations is a real problem for all countries, hence the need for appropriate tackling strategies, from a multitude of theoretical and practical perspectives. One of these, the neoinstitutional theoretical perspective, considers that individuals` behaviour is shaped by the institutional environment they are embedded in, defined by three pillars namely, the regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive pillars. Based on this perspective, in our study we aim to investigate, at exploratory level, the relationship between the degree of development of e-Government services and the level of informal economy, with a specific focus on the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on people’s perceptions about this relationship in several EU countries with high percentages of undeclared work and a lower degree of e-Government development. We employed secondary data extracted from previous surveys (Eurobarometers, eGovernment benchmarks, UN eGov Survey), combined with a quick online survey of a small number of experts’ perceptions about undeclared work and e-Government services during the pandemic in one of the analyzed countries. The study is exploratory and can serve as a starting point for future tests of the new theoretical developments suggested in the field.