With an aim to enroll over 200 Indian startups in 2018, Estonia has become the first country to launch an e-Residency programme that enables anyone to run a global EU company remotely from anywhere in the world.
To further expand the programme and to discuss bilateral cooperation in the field of Cyber Security, Digitalization, e-Governance, Smart Cities and encourage more Indian startups to become e-Residents, Estonian Entrepreneurship and IT Minister, Urve Palo, visited the Capital recently and shared additional insights into the e-Residency programme.
Minister of Entrepreneurship and Information Technology Urve Palo (SDE) and France's Secretary of State for Digital Affairs Mounir Mahjoubi are to sign a cooperation agreement between the two countries, the goal of which is to exchange best practices and solutions in the field of e-governance and digital governance.
In the agreement to be signed on Monday, both countries state the wish to keep the digital field as the horizontal priority of both countries' policies. The goal of this cooperation is to exchange experience, different e-solutions and information as well as principles in the fields of e-governance, digital economy and cyber security, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications said.
stonia should be creating technologies that support community and the global community needs governments who understand the moral consequences of the impact of technologies on peoples’ lives, Kadi Maria Vooglaid, a PhD candidate in public administration, writes.
In September 2017, something of a minor catastrophe started to unfold in Estonia. The cornerstone of the country’s international reputation as the pioneer of electronic government – the digital identification system – was discovered to exhibit security risks, provoking PR panic in the central government as well as prompting a domestic political (and technological) crisis just in time for local elections. Suddenly, the whole future of the proud Estonian practice of e-voting was brought into question.
Read more: EE: What should be the state’s role in a digital future?
A technical solution was completed this week which will allow for data exchange between Estonia and Finland via the X-Road data exchange layer.
"Preparations that have been underway for nearly a year have been completed by now, and along with developers, we have now reached the stage where we are anxiously looking forward to the exchange of the first data between the two countries," Andrus Kaarelson, director of information systems at the Information System Authority (RIA), said in a press release. "With the data exchange, we have created the conditions for implementing cross-border e-services."
Read more: Estonia technically ready to begin exchanging data with Finland via X-Road
Estonian Prime Minister Juri Ratas highlighted the construction of the very high-speed 5G internet connection, which brings the internet and self-driving cars into the everyday lives of people, as one of the biggest digital achievements of Estonia's EU presidency in a speech on Thursday in Brussels.
According to Ratas, the payment of value added tax on the cross-border sale of goods will soon become simpler for undertakings. In addition, the European Union reached an agreement on how to update cross-border payment regulations in order to change the situation in which internet businesses only pay income tax in the state in which they are registered, not where they earn their profit.
Read more: Estonian PM: 5G internet connection is digital result of Estonia's EU presidency