Digital Government and Administrative Burden Reduction

Administrative burden represents the costs to businesses, citizens and the administration itself of complying with government regulations and procedures. The burden tends to increase with new forms of public governance that rely less on direct decisions and actions undertaken by traditional government bureaucracies, and more on government creating and regulating the environment for other, non-state actors to jointly address public needs. Based on the reviews of research and policy literature, this paper explores administrative burden as a policy problem, presents how Digital Government (DG) could be applied to address this problem, and identifies societal adoption, organizational readiness and other conditions under which DG can be an effective tool for Administrative Burden Reduction (ABR). Finally, the paper tracks ABR to the latest Contextualization stage in the DG evolution, and discusses possible development approaches and technological potential of pursuing ABR through DG.