E-Government Insights to Smart Cities Research: European Union (EU) Study and the Role of Regulations

Abstract

The recent evolution of smart cities research has initiated a holistic dialogue for the integration of past initiatives promoting e-government at European Union Level. At the same moment Future Smart Cities research, is justified as a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary research domain. Within this context this research work provides insights for the integration of Economics, E-government, Information Systems, and Social Sciences. The study addresses the e-government process as one of the most important application of smart cities in our current societies. More specifically, we have examined the existence of $\beta $ -convergence between EU member states in terms of e-government services, confirming the hypothesis that low performance countries record higher growth rate than developed countries. In order to move closer to the factors with high impact on e-government development, we have analyzed other variables for testing the differences between countries, in terms of education, digital skills and access to internet for controlling the hypothesis that countries initially have different development conditions and they will not probably converge to the same steady state. We found that the opportunity of using e-services, particularly e-government services, is less accessible to citizens with low overall digital skills and, as is technically normal, to those with low access to internet access. In this context, at EU level it is needed to rethink and design the e-government services in order to be adapted not only to needs of the citizens, but also to their digital skills. The main contribution of this research is two-fold: From one side provides an integrated study with emphasis on the impact of social sciences and economics research to Future Smart Cities Research and from the other side it brings forward several soft factors for the adoption of Smart Cities services in the context of government transformation and provision of ubiquitous e-services to citizens.