Abstract:

Two recent transformations, the globalization of the economy and the diffusion of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT), which are modifying the economy, led to formulate guidelines for exploiting the potential offered by the new economy in the 2000 Lisbon European Council. From this moment are launched in Europe, and therefore in Spain, most of the initiatives designed to modernize the government and put online public services with the aim of improving the relations between Administration and the citizens.

The development of digital services in Spain has been marked by the different modernization strategies implemented by the different levels of decision and the adoption of several laws. In particular, it is important to emphasize the implications of the approval of the Law 11/2007 of Electronic Access of the Citizens to the Public Services (LAECSP) since it forced to develop a set of services to attend to a series of demands including availability, universality, quality or efficiency. As a result, with this Law, electronic access to the public services becomes a right for the citizen and the Public Administrations have the obligation to make it possible.

In this sense, the aim of our research is to analyze the transformations that the ICT and Internet are producing in the Public Administrations and the degree of development of e-Government services as a result of this process. For it we structure the paper in four parts. After the introduction, in the second section there will be described the initiatives that the different levels of decision are applying to stimulate the e-Government. In the third section, we will make a measurement of the use that both citizens and enterprises carry out of public services and we will construct a synthetic indicator that allows us to measure the degree of development of e-Government at regional level. The results will be able to compare with empirical studies realized previously that they will allow us to know the regional dynamics in the degree of development of the e-Government. Finally, the study concludes with a presentation of the principal conclusions that they will try to show if actually the ICT and Internet are transforming the relations between the Administrations and the citizens and companies.

Keywords:

Society of Information, Information and Communications Technology, digital services, synthetic indicator, e-Government.