Do digital governments foster economic growth in the developing world? An empirical analysis

The research has largely documented favorable economic outcomes of investing in Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). Does implementation and adoption of ICT in the public sector also lead to favorable economic gains? The answer to this question has received little attention. The available evidence is largely country-specific from the developed world. This study contributes to the empirical literature on ICT-growth nexus by analytically exploring and empirically testing the relationship of e-government with economic growth of 122 developing economies over the period 2003–2015. The empirical analysis is based on Fixed Effects, Random Effects, and System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). The results show that an implementation of an e-government in developing economies causes a robust positive impact on economic growth. This finding is shown to be robust to different specifications, to different econometric techniques and to the endogeneity problem.