Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 27 (2013) 177–189

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/sced

The role of technology, organization and contextual factors in

the development of e-Government services: An empirical
analysis on Italian Local Public Administrations夽
Davide Arduini a , Mario Denni b,∗ , Matteo Lucchese a,c , Alessandra Nurra c ,
Antonello Zanfei a
a
Department of Economics, Society and Politics, University of Urbino “Carlo Bo”, Italy
b
Antitrust Authority, Italy
c
National Bureau of Statistics, Italy

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Using data drawn from the 2007 and 2009 Istat ICT-PA surveys on 4471 Italian munic-
Received January 2013 ipalities, we identify the technological, organizational, and contextual factors associated
Received in revised form May 2013
with the development of e-Government services in local administrations. We find that
Accepted June 2013
both outsourcing and internal accumulation of ICT competencies are strongly correlated
Available online 15 July 2013
to the provision of these services. Moreover we observe that in-house ICT activities have
twice as high an impact on e-Government development as compared to ICT outsourcing.
JEL classification:
O14 The enactment of advanced e-services is less likely in the case of small municipalities, in
O33 sparsely populated areas, and in the presence of higher rates of growth of the elder com-
O38 ponent of population. By contrast it is more likely in areas characterized by more intense
H11 patenting activities, which in turn favour a dynamic and sophisticated demand for new
services. Though broadly consistent with Fountain’s “technology enactment framework”,
Keywords:
our findings suggest that more emphasis should be given to the internal competencies of
e-Government
Technology enactment
public administrations, and to context specific factors reflecting the characteristics of end
Innovation in services users.
Composite indexes © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction information and communication technology (ICT) in par-

The idea that innovation is not only a matter of tech-
nical change but also entails profound transformations in
organizational structures and in the socio-economic envi-
ronment is ancient in economic literature (Schumpeter,
1942; Nelson, 1994). In recent decades this idea has been
significantly revived in connection with the debate on
general purpose technologies, and on the diffusion of
夽 Funds from the European Investment Bank (Eiburs – EIB Univer-
sity Research Sponsorship Programme, Line of research: Development
of public e-services in Europe (2010–2013) TAIPS project) are gratefully
acknowledged.
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 3204236309.
E-mail address: mario.denni@agcm.it (M. Denni).
ticular. The interplay of technical, organizational, and
institutional change has been extensively explored with
reference to private sectors, at both the aggregate and
micro levels (Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 1998, 2000; Machin
and Van Reenen, 1998; Bartel et al., 2007; Cette and Lopez,
2010), and has received limited albeit increasing attention
in studies on innovation in the public sector (Caldas et al.,
2005; Seri and Zanfei, 2012).
The issue is of paramount importance in the case of e-
Government services.1 In fact, the usage of ICT tools and
1
A classical definition of e-Government is “utilizing the Internet and
the World-Wide-Web for delivering government information and services to
citizens and firms” (UN/ASPA 2002).

0954-349X/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.strueco.2013.06.007
178 D. Arduini et al. / Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 27 (2013) 177–189
digital networks for the development of web-based ser-
vices implies a number of fundamental organizational and
institutional transformations, including: changes in deci-
sion making processes; upgrading competencies and skills
for all actors involved; codification and transmission of
information bits; coordination and enhancement of com-
munication within and across public administrations (PAs);
and substantial interactions with both vendors of technol-
ogy and users of new services (Fountain, 2001; Serrano
Cinca et al., 2003; Gil-Garcia, 2005; Arduini et al., 2010).
It is important to stress that these transformations do
not only involve PAs, but also the general context in which
they are active. Policy makers, suppliers of infrastructures
and applications, intermediate and final users, including
citizens, firms and other institutions, will also need to
engage in the process, to increase their competencies and
to adapt their behaviour. Failure to accompany techni-
cal change with appropriate organizational and contextual
changes has often contributed to undermine the actual
diffusion and adoption of e-Government services (Heeks,
1999, 2006; Fountain, 2005).
In this paper we shall build on the “technology enact-
ment” framework introduced by Fountain (2001, 2005)
to analyze the co-existence of technical, organizational,
and contextual factors in the diffusion of e-Government,
with specific reference to services provided by Italian
municipalities. Consistent with this framework we shall
particularly emphasize the role of both competence accu-
mulation within PAs and outsourcing of ICT activities. This
helps highlight the complexities of knowledge manage-
ment in the process of new service development. On the
one hand, internal training and skill upgrading are neces-
sary for PAs to engage in e-service design and provision.
On the other hand, they are needed to accumulate absorp-
tive capacity and gain access to external competencies
that are complementary and essential in the process of
e-Government development and diffusion.
Moreover, we shall highlight some factors that are
only marginally considered in the technology enactment
scheme, that have to do with the role of users and demand
factors. While Fountain (2001, 2005) does acknowledge the
importance of contextual factors, her emphasis is on the
supply side. As we shall see, she assigns a key role to orga-
nizational factors within PAs and to the relationships with
policy makers and vendors of technology. Limited atten-
tion is given to users of ICTs and e-Government services
that are external to PAs, namely citizens, firms and other
institutions. In this framework, users are substantially seen
as constraints to PAs’ action. Indeed, they may be impor-
tant constraints as civil society becomes more demanding
and influences the outcomes of service provision by con-
tributing to the definition of social and cultural objectives
to be pursued. It remains, however, that users are seen
as either passive adopters or as an extra-cost that PAs
must take into account when delivering new services. We
argue that this view is being largely overtaken by the cur-
rent evolution of digital networks, which is increasingly
characterized by the direct involvement of users in defin-
ing the rate and direction of e-Government development.
As extensively documented in specialized literature, PAs
are increasingly induced to collaborate with users in new
service provision. PAs need not only interpret their actual
and potential demands but also necessitate to accompany
users and even follow them in their service co-production
initiatives (Osimo et al., 2012). Drivers of this transforma-
tion are largely beyond the scope of the present analysis,
and include: new technological opportunities offered by
crowd-sourcing and web 2.0, open sourcing movements
as well as the increasing political pressure and financial
constraints imposed on PAs, leading them to search for
new ways of organizing service provision. What is worth
emphasizing here is that e-Government development can
hardly be understood by looking exclusively or mainly at
the internal organization of PAs. This entails that more
attention should be given to the demand side, to capture
those contextual factors that increasingly contribute to e-
service design, implementation, and diffusion.
To illustrate the co-existence of technical, organiza-
tional, and contextual factors affecting e-Government
development, we shall utilize different sets of data sup-
plied by the Italian Bureau of Statistics (Istat). We shall
particularly rely on Istat’s 2007 and 2009 ICT-PA surveys
on “Information and Communication Technologies in Local
Public Administrations”, that provide information on in-
house competence accumulation and outsourcing in the
fields of ICTs and on e-Government service provision by
Italian PAs at the municipality level. The development
of e-Government is measured by means of a composite
indicator (the Front-Office Index) describing the availabil-
ity (number of thematic areas covered) and the quality
(level of interactivity) of e-Government services offered by
municipalities. We shall also use data from complementary
sources to capture the role played by some external factors
affecting the diffusion and the provision of public e-services
at the local level, with a specific focus on the character-
istics of demand (age profile of population, its territorial
dispersion and rate of innovativeness at the local level).
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section two introduces and briefly discusses Fountain’s
“technology enactment” framework, which will be uti-
lized as the main reference for the subsequent empirical
analysis. Section three reviews extant empirical studies
exploring the determinants of e-Government develop-
ment. Section four presents data sources and methods used
to construct our Front-Office Index. Section five discusses
the findings of our econometric exercises on the factors
associated with e-Government diffusion in Italy, including
some model diagnostics to check the robustness of results.
Finally, section six draws some conclusions.
2. The technology enactment framework
As defined by Fountain (2005), the “technology
enactment framework” is a “structural and institutional
approach” to analyze the paths of introduction and use of
technology in public governance. She argues that, in order
to interpret these paths, “it is imperative to understand orga-
nizational structures, processes, cultures and organizational
change” that takes place within public administrations
in the more general context of socio-economic evolution
(Fountain, 2005, p. 150).
 D. Arduini et al. / Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 27 (2013) 177–189
From this perspective, the technology enactment frame-
work has clear connections with the more general
institutional approaches to social change2 and offers pow-
erful lenses to study the relationships between technology
and organizations, and how organizations utilize ICTs
according to their cultural, social and institutional features
(Yildiz, 2007). According to Fountain (2001) technology
enactment “refers to the tendency to implement new infor-
mation technology in ways that reproduce, indeed strengthen,
institutionalized socio-structural mechanisms even when
such enactments lead too seemingly irrational and ostensibly
sub-optimal use of technology”. She finds that many of the
innovative uses of ICT in government take place in super-
ficial aspects of operations and processes, which are easily
accepted and modified taking into account that they leave
the organizational structure intact. In general, first appli-
cations of a new technology tend to reinforce the current
situation so as to improve efficiency but without aim-
ing at qualitative improvements, focusing mainly on task
automation. Deeper changes generate greater resistance,
although they probably imply more significant achieve-
ments.
Fountain’s framework identifies two aspects of technol-
ogy in general, and of ICT in particular. In fact one should
distinguish “objective technologies” from “enacted tech-
nologies”. The former consist of what she calls “material
systems”, such as hardware, software, and telecommunica-
tion networks, which “exists apart from the ways people use
them”. Enacted technologies instead identify “the ways that
systems are used by actors in an organization”, and are thus
conceived for specific applications, programmes, services
and systems developed through negotiation among politi-
cal and institutional actors and shaped by organizational
forms. At the organizational level, enacted technologies
can be characterized as the features of the technology
that are actually in place (they are included in the exist-
ing information systems) in contrast to all the features
that could be potentially included (objective technology).
Thus, there is a substantial distinction between the objec-
tive properties of ICTs and their embeddedness in ongoing,
complex organizations and institutional arrangements. In
other words, technology is not implemented in a vac-
uum: its actual use for social and economic purposes is
shaped by, and interacts with, organizational and institu-
tional change. Consistent with this framework, a number
2
Scholars from various disciplines, such as economics (North, 1999;
Rutherford, 1999), sociology (Brinton and Nee, 1998) and political science
(March and Olsen, 1989; Peters, 2001), have used institutional approaches
to analyze different social phenomena. A number of researchers have
already used insights from these studies to examine how the evolution
of norms, codes of conduct and organizational structures interacts with
the introduction of new technology and of ICT in particular. A number of
interrelated issues in the development of ICTs can be addressed using
institutional approaches, including: ICT adoption and innovation (Teo
et al., 2003; Swanson and Ramiller, 2004; Currie, 2004; Fountain, 2001),
information systems development (Laudon, 1985; Necolaou, 1999; Klein,
2000; Butler, 2003), institutionalization of ICT (Avgerou, 2000; Alvarez,
2001; Chatterjee et al., 2002; Silva and Backhouse, 2003), ICT and organi-
zational change (Robey and Holmstrom, 2001; Avgerou, 2002; Fountain,
2003, 2007) and the enactment of ICT in organizations (Fountain, 2001;
Lamb and Kling, 2003; Lamb et al., 2003).
179
of scholars have highlighted the role of institutional
aspects affecting technological enactment, including: the
social attitudes towards the introduction of new services
(Fountain, 2001); the compliance with existing norms
and regulations (Harris, 2000), and the complexities of
governmental systems (specialized committees, vested
interests, informal rules and common administrative prac-
tices) (Dawes, 1996). Organizational factors emphasized
in this literature are: the characteristics of bureaucracies
within PAs (Fountain, 2001, 2005), the nature and evolu-
tion of networking activities (Dawes and Pardo, 2002), the
alignment between organizational goals and ICT projects
(Andersen et al., 1994), and the cultural and political
resistance to the introduction of innovation that may
be expressed by individuals within public organizations
(Bellamy, 2000).
It is worth emphasizing one key organizational aspect
highlighted in this framework, that is the continuous ten-
sion between outsourcing and competence accumulation
within PAs. On the one hand, some services and systems
will be outsourced to comply with increasing financial con-
straints. Moreover, outsourcing might be an easy way out
from difficult political negotiations that would be required
to integrate new competencies, share information and
coordinate communication within and across agencies.
On the other hand, internal competencies are necessary
to monitor technological opportunities, to enable public
organization to protect sensitive data and processes, to
deal with multiple communication channels, and to absorb
external knowledge. As Fountain (2005, p. 161) observes:
“Outsourcing may appear to be the easier course of action.
But ultimately public administrations must make difficult
decisions regarding asset specificity, that is, the knowledge
and skills that should reside within the government”. A fun-
damental implication is that, while there is a variety of
combinations between outsourcing and in-house compe-
tence development strategies, it is quite unlikely that PAs
will totally give up internal knowledge assets and skills. In
fact, the latter are needed inter alia to take advantage from,
and govern, collaborations with external partners and out-
sourcing processes themselves.
Fountain identifies three key groups of actors in the co-
evolution processes that will eventually lead to different
patterns of technology enactment. The first group consists
of vendors and consultants, which in her view are largely
responsible for objective technology. Their expertise often
lies in identification of the appropriate functionality for a
given organizational mission and set of business processes.
Actors of the second group, include ICT managers and deci-
sion makers of public organizations. These are primarily
responsible for technology enactment. Actors of the third
group (operators, civil servants) influence organizational
structures and processes as well as technology enactment.
For the purpose of the present analysis it is important
to note that Fountain’s framework has the merit of calling
attention to some fundamental organizational imperatives
that need be tackled to implement technology and enable
PAs to offer effective services. Moreover her interpre-
tive scheme highlights that technology enactment is the
outcome of complex processes involving different actors
both within and outside the public sector. However, this
180 D. Arduini et al. / Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 27 (2013) 177–189
framework concentrates its attention on the supply side
and largely disregards the key role of factors on the demand
side. In fact, citizens and firms utilizing e-Government
services enter this framework as mere constraints to a pro-
cess of technology enactment wherein other actors play a
key role (civil servants, ICT managers, vendors and con-
sultants). As final users are increasingly involved in the
creative use of ICTs and of the Internet, more emphasis
should be placed on the characteristics of demand factors
in the process of technology enactment.
3. Empirical studies on e-Government service
development
Benchmarking studies of e-Government have been pub-
lished regularly by national and supra-national institutions
or by consultancy firms (Economist Intelligence Unit,
Accenture, European Commission, United Nations, UK Cab-
inet Office). However, most of this literature focuses on
central and federal governments and does not offer detailed
analyses of technological, organizational and contextual
factors associated with e-service provision.
From an empirical point of view, the technology enact-
ment framework has been tested mainly by means of
case studies. Fountain (2001) has conducted in-depth
analyses on how different organizations within the U.S.
government select components of objective technology
and enact them to suit their needs. Her case studies have
inter alia focused on the International Trade Data System,
a government-wide programme for processing informa-
tion on international trade; the U.S. Business Advisor, the
nation’s first federal government web portal; and the Ninth
Infantry Division. She states: “Institutions and organizations
shape the enactment of information technology. Technol-
ogy, in turn, may reshape organizations and institutions to
better conform to its logic or systems of rules. New infor-
mation technologies are enacted – made sense of, designed
and used – through the mediation of existing organizational
and institutional arrangements with their own internal logics
or tendencies. These multiple logics are embedded in operat-
ing routines, performance programmes, bureaucratic politics,
norms, cultural beliefs, and social networks”.
Thus, her work reveals the complex set of actions
and actors that influence the implementation of ICT in
the American public sector. Drawing from detailed case
histories, she highlights how political agendas, organiza-
tional characteristics (emphasizing the role of bureaucratic
organizations in the public sector context) and existing
arrangements shape the process of ICT implementation.
We are aware of only one work which has explicitly
tested the technology enactment framework employing
quantitative methods and using data at the sub-national
level. This is the case of Gil-Garcia (2005) who develops a
model including multiple factors (such as organizational,
institutional, and contextual factors) that influence the
functionality of e-Government websites in the 50 US States.
The empirical analysis was carried out using Partial Least
Square (PLS) techniques, which appear to be appropriate as
the author deals with a small sized sample. The dependent
variable (the functionality/quality of the state website)
was measured with three different scales: overall state
e-Government ranking; digital state e-commerce score and
online services. The first two are composite indices and
they include important elements such as number of online
services, electronic payments, types of online information,
specific government forms, usability assessment, e-mail
responsiveness, privacy and security and foreign language
access.
Organizational factors (such as size of the ICT staff,
budget structure, ICT training, in-house development, out-
sourcing and marketing strategy) were found to have a
significant effect on state website functionality. The over-
all size of the state economy (total state revenue, total
state debt, government gross state product and the num-
ber of jobs and private earnings in several industries such as
state government, local government, education, communi-
cation, electronic and other electric equipment) also has a
significant impact on the functionality of a state website.
In spite of the growing attention that is being given by
different streams of literature to the development of e-
Government in advanced economies, there are not many
other studies directly testing to what extent organiza-
tional, institutional and environmental variables (external
and internal to Local Administrations), could contribute to
explaining the availability and adoption of public e-services
at sub-national level.
Other studies that have addressed the diffusion of ICTs
in the public sector without explicitly testing the technol-
ogy enactment framework, have provided useful insights
on the role played by some of the key technological, orga-
nizational and contextual factors identified in the empirical
studies by Fountain (2001, 2005) and by Gil-Garcia (2005)
we have just reviewed.
Pina et al. (2007) compare the development and sophis-
tication of the web sites of 76 cities and 242 regions in
15 countries of the EU and apply a standard OLS model
to test correlations between e-Government supply and
characteristics of PAs (Anglo-Saxon, Nordic and main-
land European administration styles),3 the diffusion of
e-Commerce (percentage of citizens who have ever pur-
chased on the Internet), and the size of cities (number of
inhabitants).
Using data from 1176 Italian municipalities in 2005,
Arduini et al. (2010) use a two-part econometric model
to test, first, the likelihood of e-Government adoption and,
second, the intensity of diffusion of these services. They find
that local PAs involved in e-Government are larger, carry
out more in-house ICT activities and are more likely to have
intra-net infrastructures than PAs that do not offer front
office digitalised services. Adopting PAs are also generally
located in regions with relatively large shares of firms using
or producing ICTs, where many other municipalities offer
digitalised services, and where the concentration of inha-
bitants in metropolitan areas is not very high. The authors
also find that the range and quality of e-Government ser-
vices supplied by local PAs tend to increase with their stock
of ICT competencies, with their efforts to train workers,
and with their ability to organize efficient interfaces with
3
The concept of public administration style is applied in this study in
order to specify the domestic context.
 D. Arduini et al. / Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 27 (2013) 177–189
end-users. Moreover, a correlation is found between the
range and quality of e-Government services offered and the
broadband infrastructure development of the geographic
area in which local PAs are located.
Nasi et al. (2011) investigate the patterns of ICT adop-
tion of a smaller sample of Italian local PAs, i.e. the top
183 municipalities with population greater than 40,000.
They show that 84% of the examined municipalities offer
transactional services through the web (i.e. what they call
a “hard implementation approach”). This group of munic-
ipalities exhibit relatively larger ICT staff, more qualified
CIOs and more extensive training programmes, as com-
pared with local PAs that only offer basic information on
their websites. The authors observe however that on aver-
age municipalities have a very small percentage of ICT staff
members and point out that this might be the result of
externalization and outsourcing activities implemented by
municipalities as part of their modernization process.
Baldersheim and Øgård (2008) analyze e-Government
developments in 75 municipalities and 54 regional Admin-
istrations of four Nordic counties (Denmark, Finland,
Norway and Sweden).
They show that two important context specific fac-
tors, such as unemployment rate, demographic change
play a key role in e-Government development. Moreover
they find that PAs’ “organizational culture” (measured by
a composite index that summarizes the extent to which
municipalities and regional Administrations have put in
place measures intended to enhance user orientation,
business orientation, participatory opportunities and an
informed citizenry) is strongly related to the e-Government
developments.
Norris and Moon (2005) examines the adoption of e-
Government by US local administrations in 2000 and 2002.
Data on 3749 local governments, including 2899 munic-
ipalities with populations greater than 10,000 and 850
counties, are gathered from the 2000 survey; while the
2002 survey has involved 7844 local governments, includ-
ing 7005 municipalities with populations greater than
2500 and 839 counties. The authors selected all respon-
ding counties from the 2002 survey and only responding
municipalities with populations greater than 10,000. Their
dataset is thus very extensive and their sample of pub-
lic administrations is one of the largest ever used, but
their focus is almost exclusively on contextual factors.4
The adoption of websites and online transactional services
were found to be positively related to the size and central-
ity of cities and to their location in the West and South of
the country.
In addition, several studies found evidence of orga-
nizational factors playing a critical role in facilitating
technological innovation in local administration. These
include: the size of organizations (Brudney and Selden,
1995; Norris and Demeter, 1999; Moon, 2002; Holden et al.,
4
The environmental factors considered in the analysis are: geographi-
cal location, organizational size, type of government (city or county), form
of government (mayor-council or council manager for cities and council-
administrator or council-elected executive for counties) and metropolitan
status (central, suburban or independent city).
181
2003); the adoption of strategic plans for e-Government
(Berry, 1994); the professional level of ICT departments
(Heeks, 2006); and their degree of autonomy and responsi-
bility within public organizations (Damanpour, 1987). Also
civil servants’ perception of advantages associated with ICT
adoption, their attitude towards change and experiences
of technological innovations (Heintze and Bretschneider,
2000) have been found to be correlated with the adoption of
ICT in local administrations. In addition, Nedovic-Budic and
Godschalk (1996) argue that personal values and beliefs
are factors affecting ICT adoption and its actual usage.
According to Rosner (1968), another important organiza-
tional factors is the presence of “slack resources” that can be
expected to increase the capacity of an organization to pur-
chase costly innovations, to absorb failures, and to explore
new ideas in advance of actual needs. Organizations that
are endowed with resources exceeding those necessary to
perform basic services and activities are in a better position
to adopt innovations (Damanpour, 1991).
To summarize, the reviewed literature does acknowl-
edge the importance of: (a) capturing the complexities of
e-Government, going beyond the mere availability of ser-
vices on the web (e.g. accounting for website functionality,
disentangling front-office from back-office aspects, mea-
suring the interactivity of e-services); and (b) addressing
a variety of factors associated with eGov development,
including technical, organizational and contextual aspects.
While rich evidence emerges from case studies and
descriptive statistics, there are few quantitative studies
jointly tackling these two tasks. Those that try to do so
either use very small samples of data (as in the case of
Gil-Garcia, 2005; Baldersheim and Øgård, 2008; Nasi et al.,
2011), or focus on more restricted sets of issues, thus pro-
viding only a partial view of the role played by factors
associated with e-Government development. Our empir-
ical tests illustrated below attempt to fill both these gaps.
4. Data and methodology
We shall refer to Fountain’s framework to examine
the factors that contribute to the development of e-
Government at the local level, using data from the 2007
and 2009 ICT-PA surveys on “Information and Commu-
nication Technologies in Local Public Administrations”,
biennially conducted by the Italian Bureau of Statistics
(Istat). The ISTAT ICT-PA survey provides information on
different aspects of the use of ICT in local administrations,
collected through a census of all municipalities with more
than 20,000 inhabitants and a sample survey for the oth-
ers. By merging 2007 and 2009 data, we obtain a dataset
of 4471 municipalities, corresponding to about 55% of the
Italian local administrations. It is worth noting that this
dataset relies on the largest available sample of local PAs,
for which we have two comparable waves of data on ICT
adoption and usage, that can be held to be representa-
tive of Italy’s public sector.5 This dataset makes it possible
to examine how organizational and technological factors
5
The sampling design has been defined by the Italian Bureau of Statis-
tics through a stratified sample by region and population size class.
182 D. Arduini et al. / Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 27 (2013) 177–189
are related to the availability of e-Government services in
Italy. Although the time series is too short to allow the
use of panel data techniques, we will mitigate endogene-
ity problems by regressing a measure of e-Government
development in 2009 on the technical and organizational
characteristics of municipalities in 2007.
Using data from the 2009 ICT-PA survey a synthetic
indicator has been computed to measure the number and
quality of online services offered. We consider this measure
as a signal of technology enactment. In other words, the
higher the availability and sophistication of e-Government
activities, the more advanced is the implementation of ICT
through which innovation in services is performed by PAs.
The procedures for the construction of this index are illus-
trated in Section 4.1. A description of the factors affecting
e-Government development in terms of Fountain’s tech-
nology enactment framework is presented in Section 4.2.
The full set of the variables considered in this paper is
shown in Table 2.
4.1. The Front-Office Index (FOI)
Our Front-Office Index is a synthetic measure of the num-
ber and quality of services offered by Italian municipalities,
based on data from the 2009 ICT-PA survey conducted by
Istat.6 Italian municipalities had to fill in a questionnaire
about the availability of online services together with their
relative level of interactivity. This information can be sum-
marized into a single quantitative index that associates
to each local administration a specific level of e-services
intensity, as a direct measure of its front-office activity.7
Online services offered were classified into 13 the-
matic areas.8 For each area, the municipality had to
specify its level of interactivity that is given by the degree
of “sophistication/interactivity” shown by the e-Services
belonging to that area.9 Following the standard method-
ology introduced by Capgemini et al. (2010), the degree
of “sophistication/interactivity” of each e-Service is arti-
culated into four levels depending on whether the user
can: (1) simply acquire relevant information; (2) download
administrative forms; (3) exchange interactive information
about the service; or (4) carry out the whole transaction
process online.
6
Other scholars have used the number and/or the quality of online ser-
vices offered to examine the level of e-Government attained (West, 2005;
Kyu-Nahm and Weare, 2008). See Section 3.
7
The methodology is similar to that used in Arduini et al. (2010).
8
Thematic areas concern: (1) environmental protection services; (2)
registry office; (3) welfare services; (4) building services; (5) culture; (6)
education; (7) public works; (8) labour and training; (9) public trans-
portation; (10) health care; (11) business services; (12) tourism; (13) local
taxation.
9 10
A thematic area can include a wide range of online services; then, for a
thematic area the municipality can show more than one level of interactiv-
ity. As the survey does not specify either the number of services belonging
to each area nor the level of interactivity of the different e-Services, we
cannot compute any synthetic measure for the area (such as, for instance,
a weighted average). Thus, we decided to assign, to each area, the highest
level of interactivity among those indicated by the municipality for that
area (actually, we are assuming that the level of interactivity of a thematic
area is given by the highest degree of sophistication the municipality is
able to achieve in – at least – one e-service offered in that area).
In order to assign a weight to each level of interactivity,
we use a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) on the
58,123 thematic areas observed.10 Then, we obtain a score
for each area, varying with the level of sophistication of
services:
Scorea,m = 0.13 × d1 + 0.25 × d2 + 0.34 × d3 + 0.28 × d4
where a is the thematic area and m is the local administra-
tion, d1 , d2 , d3 , d4 are binary variables associated with the
levels of interactivity.
As the sum of weights obtained through the MCA is
equal to 1, the score for each area ranges from 0 to 1, the
highest value being obtained if all four levels of sophistica-
tion are attained by a given service area. In order to sum up
the information coming from the different areas, we add
the single scores, so that each administration will obtain a
final index, ranging from 0 to 13, which defines a measure
of the number and the quality of online services offered.11

13
Front-Office Indexm = Scorea,m
a=1
Average values of this indicator by population size-
classes, degree of urbanization, and macro-regions are
illustrated in Table 1.
Consistent with an extensive literature on this topic
(see Section 3), this Table shows that online service provi-
sion is positively correlated with the size of municipalities
and with the degree of urbanization of areas in which PAs
are active: more densely populated areas exhibit higher
degrees of e-service development. Moreover, the index
confirms the traditional dualism between Northern and
Southern Italian regions (however, some 13% of Southern
municipalities rank in the fourth quartile of our Front-
Office Index).
At first glance there seems to exist a strong com-
plementarity between e-Government and technological
competencies of the municipalities. We checked with a
simple T-test that the Front-Office Index rises from 1.76
to 3.25 when comparing municipalities without an ICT
department with those that do have it, and this difference
is statistically significant.
4.2. Technological, organizational and contextual
variables
Following Fountain’s technology enactment frame-
work, factors associated with the provision of e-
Government services are classified as follows (see Table 2
for a full description of variables):
We count 13 areas for 4471 municipalities. This data-driven method-
ology assigns a weight to each level of interactivity by evaluating the
variability among the thematic areas and their relative importance, reduc-
ing the bias of a subjective attribution of weights.
11
It is worth noting that this composite index does not apply a different
weight to each thematic area. However, sub-indices obtained by selecting
specific thematic areas show a high correlation with the general index.
The same high correlation is observed when we restrict the analysis to the
thematic areas which define the core activities of a municipality (registry
office, public works, local taxation).
 D. Arduini et al. / Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 27 (2013) 177–189 183

Table 1 - Technological factors. These include all kinds of techni-

Descriptive statistics for the Front-Office Index.
cal equipment and infrastructural endowments, whose
Mean st. d. usage by PAs will eventually lead to the supply of e-
Population size
services. Using Fountain’s terminology these would be
Up to 5000 1.48 1.40 identified as “objective technologies”. In our empirical
From 5000 to 10,000 2.66 1.48 model we used two binary variables to capture such
From 10,000 to 20,000 3.13 1.59 technological factors: a dummy named Broadband access,
From 20,000 to 60,000 3.34 1.70
which indicates whether or not the PA has a broad-
Over 60,000 5.20 2.27
Over 200,000 6.25 1.80 band access to the Internet; and another dummy variable
Degree of urbanizationa named Smart cards players, which assumes value one if
Low 1.47 1.47 the PA is endowed with external hardware devices that
Intermediate 2.35 1.69 allow to employ electronic identification cards (zero oth-
High 3.21 1.70
Macro-regionsb
erwise).
North-West regions 2.06 1.67 - Organizational factors. We singled out four variables that
North-East regions 2.42 1.74 can help characterize PAs in terms of their ability to man-
Centre regions 2.43 1.88 age and utilize, and hence “enact” technologies. First,
South regions 1.50 1.46
we used a dummy identifying whether or not the pub-
Total 2.06 1.71 lic organization has invested in ICT related activities (ICT
a
The degree of urbanization is based on the population density and on training). Second, we measured the in-house accumula-
the contiguity among areas. tion of technical competencies in ICT, by calculating the
b
North-West (Valle d’Aosta, Lombardia, Piemonte and Liguria); North- share of ICT related activities recorded by the survey that
East regions (Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Trentino Alto-Adige and
are operated with internal staff (ICT in-house). Third, and
Emilia-Romagna); Centre regions (Toscana, Umbria, Lazio and Marche);
South regions (Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Basilicata, Puglia, Calabria, symmetrically, we measured ICT outsourcing, as the share
Sicilia and Sardegna). of ICT related activities that are operated with external
staff. Finally, we also controlled for the size of public

Table 2
Data sources, variables and their categorization according to Fountain’s technology enactment framework.

Variable Description Level of Source of data

analysis (year)

Dependent variable
Enacted technology Front-Office Composite indicator measuring the availability and Municipality Istat (2009)
Index (FOI) the interactivity of online services for each
Administration
Independent variables
Technological factors Smart cards Binary variable taking on the value 1 if Municipality Istat (2007)
(objective technologies) players Administration has Smart card playersa
Broadband Binary variable taking on the value 1 if Municipality Istat (2007)
access Administration has broadband access to the
Internetb
ICT training Binary variable taking on the value 1 if Municipality Istat (2007)
Administration has sponsored at least one of the
Organizational factors
following training programmes: office automation,
operation systems, web, data management, and
European Computer Driving License
ICT in-house Share of ICT-related activities operated with Municipality Istat (2007)
internal staffc
ICT outsourcing Share of ICT-related activities operated with Municipality Istat (2007)
external staffd
Municipal size Total number of employees of the local PA Municipality Istat (2007)
Territorial Binary variable taking on the value 1 if Municipality Istat (2007)
Contextual factors dispersion Administration is within sparsely-populated arease
Demographic Over 64 years population growth rates Municipality Istat
change (2001–2008) (2001–2008)
Patents Number of registered patents in 2009 per million Provincial Istat (2009)
inhabitants
Other controls Regional Binary variables taking value 1 if the municipality Municipality
Dummies is located in a Southern (North Western or North
South, NW, NE Eastern) region
a
External hardware devices that allow, through specific programmes, to use the functionality offered by smart cards.
b
We consider broadband as a transmission capacity that is faster than primary rate ISDN, at 2 MB/s.
c
ICT-related activities taken into account are: project management, software development, hardware management, software management, systems
management, network management, database management, ICT related security, web/Internet technologies development and management, web content
management, data entry, PC users assistance, ICT training, and e-commerce systems.
d
See note c.
e
Eurostat degree of urbanization (DEGURBA).
184 D. Arduini et al. / Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 27 (2013) 177–189
organizations (Municipal size), measured in terms of num-
ber of employees of PAs.
- Finally, contextual factors have been also considered. In
particular, we focused on a set of variables that are
mainly apt to capture the role of demand in shaping e-
Government development. As anticipated in Section 2,
this set of determinants has been largely disregarded in
the technology enactment framework, but appear to be
increasingly important in the process of e-service devel-
opment. Four variables have been introduced for this
purpose. First we used a dummy to identify whether or
not PAs are located in sparsely populated areas (Terri-
torial dispersion). We consider this variable as revealing
the actual need for e-Government services. While terri-
torial dispersion implies that long distances need to be
covered to access to municipal services (hence encour-
aging the introduction of e-services), it also entails lower
traffic congestion problems and lower concentration of
industrial and service activities (which in turn reduce
the demand for e-services). Second, we control for Demo-
graphic change, that is the growth rate of elder population
(over 65) in 2001–2008. We expect this fraction of elderly
population to be less capable to effectively use new ser-
vices, and hence this variable to negatively impact on
e-Government. Third, we test for the innovativeness of
the area, by controlling for the number of registered
patents of inventors resident in the province where the
PA is located (Patents). We consider the latter as a rough
proxy of how dynamic, creative and knowledgeable cit-
izens and firms are in the area and thus be positively
correlated with e-Government development.
5. An exploratory analysis at the micro level: results
and discussion
Based on the literature reviewed in Sections 2 and 3, we
shall hereafter test how the three sets of factors we have
just identified (organizational, technological, and contex-
tual) affect the process of e-Government development in
Italy.
We consider a Tobit model where a latent random vari-
able yi linearly depends on xi , i.e.
yi∗ = xi ˇ + εi
with the error term εi which is independently and normally
distributed with mean 0 and variance  2 . Due to the nature
of our Front-Office Index (with 652 zeroes), the observed
value yi is censored below 0 and has a censoring value
below 13 (this being the maximum number of service areas
considered by the survey).
yi = yi∗ if 0 < yi∗ < 13
0 if yi∗ = 0
We run heteroschedastic robust estimates, also check-
ing for correlation among the provinces. All variables are
expressed in absolute values, except for the municipality
size which enters the model in log. As anticipated earlier,
technological and organizational variables are referred to
2007, in order to minimize potential endogeneity prob-
lems.
In order to explore the different importance of variables,
we present three different specifications:
(i) the first including technological variables only;
(ii) the second including the technological and organiza-
tional variables;
(iii) the last including all the covariates.
In Model#4, we also add macro-regional dummies in
order to control for heterogeneity in the geographic distri-
bution of e-Government services.
Pair-wise correlations among explanatory variables are
generally low, with only few figures above 0.3, as shown
in Table A.1 (see Appendix). Usual tests, including the
Variance Inflation Factor (VIF), show the absence of multi-
collinearity. In addition, excluding some variables that can
be more subject to collinearity does not alter the results.
Results for the Tobit model are reported in Table 3.12
First, as shown in Model#1, technological factors (objec-
tive technologies) are significant and positively related to
the Front-Office Index (FOI). ICT-based devices and access
infrastructures are needed and should be in place to
offer e-Government services reliably and effectively to end
users (McClure, 2000). The potential of these technologies
is to support business process management and inte-
grate the operations of information systems across local
administrations (Stallings, 2000; Kurose and Ross, 2003).
Basic enabling technologies, such as Broadband access
connections, can be expected to support the provision
of user-friendly and innovative online services involving
the transmission of data of various formats such as text,
graphics, audio and video. Smart card players are simple
hardware devices, which allow civil servants to use rela-
tively advanced ICT applications governed by smart cards,
although their utilization requires some training within
PAs.13
In short, PAs’ endowment with information technology
equipment and infrastructure is an essential factor for the
performance of electronic government.
However, the availability of e-Government services,
far from being an exclusively technological phenomenon,
requires the implementation of new operational skills and
procedures within local administrations. We thus further
12
In Table 3, we only report the significant variables. A preliminary anal-
ysis has tested a higher number of variables. In particular, the affiliation of
a municipality to a district is not significant when other variables are con-
sidered. Variables (at the regional level) on the use of ICTs technologies
by individuals and firms are generally positive but not significant.
13
Smart cards for accessing network services can be of various typolo-
gies (Claub and Kohntopp, 2001). These include: the Electronic Identity
Card (EIC), released by the municipalities in substitution of the traditional
Identity Card; and network service access cards (e.g. health care service
cards), that must correspond to a unique standard called National Services
Card (NSC). The NSC is an instrument to be identified on the network and
through the introduction of electronic signature will enable the holder to
submit official documents and the local administration to provide certifi-
cates. These cards, emitted by a public institution, have to comply with
strict security requirements. Thanks to these support tools users (civil ser-
vants, firms and citizens) are no longer compelled to supply a series of data
over the network to gain access to services distributed online by different
public administrations (Shim et al., 2005; Belanger and Hiller, 2006).
 D. Arduini et al. / Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 27 (2013) 177–189 185

Table 3
The influence of technological, organizational and contextual factors on the development of e-Government.

Model #1 Model #2 Model #3 Model #4

Coefficient s.e. Coefficient s.e. Coefficient s.e. Coefficient s.e.

Dependent variable: Front-Office Index Tobit model (heteroskedastic robust estimates)

Technological variables
Smart card technology 0.99 0.12*** 0.33 0.08*** 0.30 0.06*** 0.19 0.07***
Broadband access 0.78 0.08*** 0.13 0.07** 0.06 0.07 0.00 0.06
Organizational variables
ICT training 0.31 0.07*** 0.26 0.07*** 0.22 0.06***
ICT in-house 0.91 0.12*** 0.81 0.11*** 0.71 0.11***
ICT outsourcing 0.71 0.14*** 0.50 0.11*** 0.35 0.10***
Municipal size (log) 0.55 0.05*** 0.54 0.05*** 0.61 0.04***
Contextual variables
Territorial dispersion −0.29 0.08*** −0.27 0.07***
Demographic change −0.10 0.07 −0.15 0.06**
Patents 0.87 0.25*** 0.50 0.21**
Control variables
North-East −0.09 0.18
North-West −0.13 0.14
South −0.88 0.14***

Constant 1.03 0.11*** −0.69 0.16*** −0.71 0.19*** −0.30 0.20

No. of observations 4471 4471 4324 4324

Information criteria AIC BIC AIC BIC AIC BIC AIC BIC
16,789 16,815 15,595 15,646 14,903 14,974 14,774 14,863

Notes: 652 left censored observation, 1 right censored observation.

*
Significant at 10% level.
**
Significant at 5% level.
***
Significant at 1% level.

control for these “organizational” characteristics of munic-
ipalities.
The way ICT competencies and activities are man-
aged appears to be crucial. As shown in Model#2, the
organizational variables we identified appear to be posi-
tively related to e-Government development. The positive
coefficient of ICT training reveals, as expected, that the accu-
mulation of internal competencies plays a key role in the
technology enactment process.
Even more important, both ICT outsourcing and
ICT in-house activities are positively correlated with
e-Government development. The positive impact of out-
sourcing is consistent with the growing emphasis on the
alleged efficiency enhancing role of making use of exter-
nal competencies and services.14 In fact, extant literature
has emphasized that the emerging trend towards outsourc-
ing has been driven by two main features: a concern to
lower costs dramatically (or at least reduce the public sec-
tor borrowing requirement), and the political belief that
private sector companies tend to be more efficient, and that
competition will increase efficiency and effectiveness of
management and operations in public services (Dunleavy
et al., 2006; Lacity et al., 2009).
However, this is only part of the story. When all the
variables are considered (Model#3), ICT in-house (ICT in-
house) has a much larger impact on e-Government than
outsourcing (ICT outsourcing). We interpret this result as a
14
Nowadays, outsourcing practices account for a large proportion of
government budgets in Europe and the Americas. For instance, during
2007–2008, the UK central government spent over 12 million GBP on
service contracts of which an estimated 38% (4.6 billion) corresponded
to ICT outsourcing deals (National Audit Office, 2008).
clear confirmation of our line of argument in Section 2. In
fact, while outsourcing might seem to be, and often is, an
easy way out from financial, technical and political difficul-
ties PAs encounter when integrating new technology into
their organizations, internal skill accumulation is essential
to effectively implement innovation and even to govern
externalization processes. Our results are consistent with
a view of technology enactment that requires both inter-
nal and external knowledge accumulation. The former does
not only favour innovation directly, but also indirectly by
increasing PAs’ absorptive capacity and abilities to control
and govern external knowledge sources.
Also the size of public organizations, measured in terms
of employees (Municipal size), appears to be positively asso-
ciated with e-Government development. Many empirical
studies reviewed in Section 3 have found that the size of PAs
encourages ICT adoption, although some non-linearity may
apply. These studies are influenced by the long-standing
innovation and technology diffusion literature that finds
that larger organizations tend to adopt new technologies
and innovations more frequently than their smaller coun-
terparts (Davies, 1979; Rogers, 1985, 1995; Battisti and
Stoneman, 2010). In the specific case of PAs, the positive
correlation we observe may have a number of explana-
tions: larger administrations generally have more technical
and financial resources, they are in a better position to
exploit economies of scales from investments in techni-
cal equipment and infrastructure, and are more exposed to
political pressure to innovate.15
15
We alternatively used a dummy to control whether small sized munic-
ipalities – with a population below 5000 inhabitants – are worse off at
186 D. Arduini et al. / Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 27 (2013) 177–189
Our findings thus confirm that the chief challenge for
Italian municipalities is not only, nor mainly, the adop-
tion of new technologies; it is an adequate organizational
structure (in terms of size, training and appropriate mix of
internal and external competencies and activities) that is
required to enact technologies and develop more produc-
tive information flows.16
As anticipated earlier in this section, contextual factors
have been also included as variables that may condition
the development and the delivery of e-services by Italian
PAs. The behaviour of these variables confirms inter alia the
remarkable influence of demand factors on e-Government
developments (Model#3 and Model#4).
Our empirical tests show that the availability of pub-
lic e-services (FOI) tends to be lower in sparsely populated
areas (Territorial dispersion). Areas with a lower population
density tend to provide less facilities and services for the
web than to those with a higher population density. There
are several reasons why this result is obtained. First of all,
people in urban areas where the financial, manufacturing,
and services industries are concentrated are more likely
to demand advanced Internet services and infrastructures
than their counterparts in remote or rural areas. Moreover,
the lower need for online service provision in less densely
populated areas might well be characterized by lower traf-
fic congestion and by the presence of smaller numbers of
end users (citizens and firms) for any given of PA employ-
ees.
Our regression results are consistent with Eurostat’s
descriptive statistics on e-services adoption, showing that
the intensity of web usage by individuals in their relation-
ships with PAs (for all levels of websites sophistication)
tends to be lower in sparsely populated areas (see Table A.2
in Appendix).
A further contextual factor we emphasize here is the
age structure of population, which we deem will sig-
nificantly affect demand for e-Government. Our variable
Demographic change, calculating the evolution occurred of
the share of older population in 2001–2008, has a nega-
tive coefficient in our econometric exercise. This appears
to confirm the important role of age barriers to Inter-
net utilization and e-participation. When the population
gets older, the pressure towards e-Government reduces,
the number of effective stakeholders and the demand for
high quality public e-services constantly being eroded.
Again, our results are consistent with Eurostat’s descriptive
statistics on the adoption of e-Government by individuals
(Table A.2 in Appendix). In 2010, e-Government online
usage shows lower percentages for the older population
(65 years old or more) than young generation (except for
developing e-Government services, and found a negative correlation as
expected. Interestingly, these municipalities are not characterized by a
lack of technological endowments compared to other administrations.
However, their performance in terms of the FOI index is significantly
lower.
16
Yet the failure rate of efforts to restructure and integrate informa-
tion flows remains high in the public sector because information flows
and structures are the result of complex social, economic, and political
relationships built up over time (Davenport and Prusak, 1998; Cohen and
Prusak, 2001).
those aged 15–24) and this result is independent of the
sophistication level of online services offered.
Finally, we find a positive correlation of Front-Office
Index with the number of patents (recorded in 2009) in
each province. It thus appears that municipalities that are
located in dynamic areas tend to intensify their provision of
public e-services. More precisely, a high number of patents
reflects the presence of an innovative environment that is
likely to express a greater and richer demand for advanced
services.17
As a further control, the introduction of regional
dummies does not alter the results, and highlights that
Southern regions – not surprisingly – are lagging behind in
terms of e-Government diffusion (Model#4). Coefficients
of the other regions are not statistically significant.18
To conclude, it is worth observing that Model#4 is
characterized by the lowest values of AIC and BIC, thus sug-
gesting that adding organizational and contextual factors
improves the overall fit of the model.19
6. Conclusion
Based on Fountain’s “technology enactment theory”,
this paper has developed a model to test whether and
how organizational, technological and contextual factors
are associated with the development of e-Government ser-
vices offered by Italian municipalities.
The role played by these factors may be different accord-
ing to specific initiatives and contexts. However, it seems
to be clear that their interrelations are very important and
studying any one of them in isolation may lead to limited
understanding of the overall process of social and economic
change.
Moreover, the key findings of the study appear to
be in line with what many consider to be the need
to integrate advanced technology availability, particu-
larly ICT, with essential complementary resources in
order to increase the value of these technologies to
the economy itself (Steinmueller, 1992; Schreyer, 2000).
Cutting-edge technology would not per se guarantee a
successful implementation of e-Government. It is shown
that e-Government initiatives are generally associated also
with sizeable organizational structures, capable ICT staff
and effective ICT training and support, combined with
advanced and dynamic usage environments.
17
The introduction of Patents as an additional control variable can be
also held responsible for the lower impact of outsourcing in models #3
and #4. Indeed, the fact that municipalities outsource ICT competencies
might simply signal the existence of a competitive supply of ICT tools and
services, which is in turn correlated with the degree of innovativeness of
firms active in the area.
18
It might appear to be counter-intuitive that the coefficient of North-
Western regions be negative, although not significant. Nevertheless, this
largely reflects that this part of the country is itself highly polarized
between very advanced metropolitan areas (Milan, Turin, Genoa) exhibit-
ing strong patterns of e-Government diffusion, and a large number of small
municipalities that are typically less prone to offer e-Gov services.
19
When fitting models, adding parameters would necessarily lead to
increase the likelihood, though this may result in over-fitting the model.
The BIC addresses this issue by introducing a penalty term for the number
of parameters in the model. The penalty term is larger in BIC than in AIC.
 D. Arduini et al. / Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 27 (2013) 177–189 187

Appendix A.

Table A.1
The pair-wise correlation matrix.

Smart card Broadband ICT training ICT ICT out- Municipality Territorial Demographic Patents
technology access in-house sourcing size dispersion change

Smart card technology 1

Broadband access 0.16 1
ICT training 0.21 0.18 1
ICT in-house 0.33 0.26 0.36 1
ICT outsourcing 0.08 0.08 0.06 −0.03 1
Municipality size 0.31 0.33 0.37 0.60 0.07 1
Territorial dispersion −0.11 −0.24 −0.19 −0.27 −0.18 −0.42 1
Demographic change −0.05 −0.08 −0.08 −0.13 −0.06 −0.18 0.15 1
Patents 0.06 0.06 0.06 0.03 0.12 −0.05 −0.20 −0.07 1

Table A.2
Percentages of individuals who used the Internet in the last 3 months for interaction with public authorities.

27 EU countries Italy 27 EU countries Italy

Individuals obtaining information from public authorities (1st level of Individuals downloading official forms (2nd level of sophistication)
sophistication)
Individuals living in 43 34 Individuals living in 27 24
densely-populated areaa densely-populated
areaa
Individuals living in 39 29 Individuals living in 24 20
intermediate urbanized intermediate
areab urbanized area b

Individuals living in 38 28 Individuals living in 24 20

sparsely populated areac sparsely populated
areac
Individuals sending filled forms (3rd level of sophistication) Individuals carrying out the whole transaction process online (4th
level of sophistication)
Individuals living in 21 12 Individuals living in 48 36
densely-populated areaa densely-populated
areaa
Individuals living in 18 10 Individuals living in 44 32
intermediate urbanized intermediate
areab urbanized areab
Individuals living in 18 9 Individuals living in 43 31
sparsely populated areac sparsely populated
c
area

Source: Eurostat (2010).

a
At least 500 inhabitants/km2 .
b
Between 100 and 499 inhabitants/km2 .
c
Less than 100 inhabitants/km2 .

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