The COVID-19 crisis creates an opportunity to step up digitalisation among subnational governments by Luiz de Mello and Teresa Ter-Minassian published by OECD (4/2020).
“Recent decades have seen rapid growth of advanced digital technologies, including high-speed computing, big data, artificial intelligence, the internet-of-things and blockchain. This “digital revolution” creates significant opportunities for all levels of government to improve the delivery of public goods and services, and to raise more and better revenue.
This is particularly important in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. Fighting a pandemic while minimising the associated economic costs calls for appropriate digital infrastructure for the design and enforcement of containment measures, as well as to ensure access by the population and enterprises to critical government services. After all, subnational governments (SNGs) account for about 40% of government spending on average in OECD countries; they also play an important role in the delivery of key services that are at the heart of the policy actions being taken to slow the spread of the pandemic, including on health care and social protection.
Much of the literature has focused so far on the scope for advanced digitalisation at the central/federal level of government. In a recent OECD paper, de Mello and Ter-Minassian (2020) focus on the opportunities and challenges that digitalisation creates for SNGs.
Advanced digital technologies can help improve the quality and efficiency of subnational programmes. Geographic information systems (GIS) are being used to identify potential environmental and health risks, which is important when it comes to controlling the spread of a pandemic and avoiding its recurrence. Of particular interest is the use of sensors, to control road and railway traffic, maintain regional or local infrastructure, and monitor water and sanitation usage, just to cite a few. Digital portals facilitate SNGs’ communication with their populations and the delivery of certain public services, and well-designed information systems can strengthen all aspects of subnational public financial management, and facilitate subnational transparency and accountability.
At the same time, regional and local governments are having to operate digitally in periods of confinement and to broaden the range of services provided on-line to the population, including in some cases in the area of e-health. The case of testing, tracing and tracking through digital devices to contain the spread of COVID-19 is a case in point, where the local governments are in many cases actively involved in these efforts, and privacy/confidentiality concerns are prompting important debates among policymakers.
Digitalisation can also help to improve both shared and own subnational revenues. This is particularly important to prepare governments to restore the sustainability of the public finances, once the post-COVID-19 recovery has been firmly established. Especially promising are possibilities to introduce, or strengthen, the enforcement of consumption
taxes, regional personal income taxes (PITs), or regional surcharges on national PITs; make more efficient and equitable the administration of local property taxes; and better utilise user fees for local services.
Digitalisation, however, also poses significant challenges for SNGs, whose capacities to deal with such challenges vary widely both across and within countries (see Figure). The most important constraint in many SNGs is likely to be the scarcity of requisite skills, not only in government leadership and bureaucracy, but also across the population at large. Lack of skills breeds, in turn, distrust and resistance to digitalisation.
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