Italy trails behind many European Union countries in the digitalisation of interactions between public administrations, citizens, and businesses, according to a report released by the artisans association Confartigianato.
The report, based on data from Eurostat and Eurobarometer, stated “only 41.3% of Italians interact with public institutions through the internet, compared to a European Union average of 54.3%.”
The Confartigianato study, published on Tuesday, also highlighted Italy “ranks in 23rd place in the EU for the digital public services offered to businesses”. This shows, the report concludes, “we are still far from European innovation standards.”
The report further revealed that “53% of local institutions have a website that is exclusively informative, By that they mean it is not enabled to interact with users; only 30% enable online payments on their websites.”
“This last percentage drops to 13% in the South,” Confartigianato noted.
On average, “only 23% of citizens interact with public administrations by sending completed documents, placing us among the lowest in the ranking of 195 European regions.” The most efficient region, the autonomous province of Bolzano, ranks 131st, while the least efficient, Calabria, ranks 184th, according to the study.
We reported in 2021, that the Anagrafe system of digitalisation was underway. However, it seems this has not been rolled out everywhere.
Businesses suffer from complex bureaucracy
The situation isn’t much better for businesses. In a country with 123,688 legislative acts published over the past century, 78% of entrepreneurs feel hindered by constant legislative changes. That is 14 percentage points higher than the 64% EU average.
Additionally, 73% of entrepreneurs complain about the complexity of administrative procedures, seven points above the 66% EU average.
A positive sign for reducing the digital divide within local public administrations comes from the increase in municipal spending on IT, telecommunications, hardware, and software services. Thanks to the support of the NRRP, this spending grew by 16.9% in 2023 compared to the previous year, with a more significant increase in the south, where spending rose by 39.8% compared to a 10.1% increase in the centre-north.
However, a gap remains in spending per inhabitant. In the south, spending on areas linked to the digitalisation of municipal services is still 25.3% lower than the centre-north average.
“A simple, efficient, digital Public Administration,” says the President of Confartigianato, Marco Granelli, “is one of the priorities to support the relaunch and competitiveness of businesses and the economic system. It is necessary to fully exploit the opportunities of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan to improve the quality of the public machine, thanks to the planned 9.6 billion euros of investments for digitalisation, innovation, and security in the Public Administration.”
