This roadmap, which is contained in a policy document adopted by the European Commission, is also an important milestone on our relations. It is a celebration of the new and higher level of maturity that our relations have reached over the last years. The last decade has seen a dynamic growth of the relations between China and Europe that has expanded well beyond the traditional areas of trade, investment and technical assistance.
There have been many changes in Europe and in China recently. Europe has successfully introduced the Euro and is about to complete its largest ever enlargement. China has joined the World Trade Organisation and a new generation of leaders has recently been appointed.
Faced with a changing international environment with new types of security concerns, we both have an ever greater interest to work together as strategic partners on the international scene to safeguard sustainable development, peace and stability.
To promote such enhanced co-operation, Europe and China should raise the efficiency of our political dialogue and we should focus on global and regional governance and security issues and on our dialogue on human rights.
During my meetings this morning with Minster Wang Xudong of the MII and the SCITO and with Minister Xu Guanhua of the MOST, I have had very fruitful discussions. Tomorrow, I will meet Minister Li Changjiang of AQSIQ, Minister Ma Kai of the NDRC and Vice Mayor of Beijing Fan Boyuan. And finally, I shall also have the pleasure of meeting with Vice Premier Huang Ju.
The co-operation that we have had so far on a variety of crucial industrial sectors has been a major success. And I think that we should build on the very positive experiences and results we have produced and explore new areas of cooperation.
These dialogues are prime examples of how Europe and China can effectively stimulate our mutual trade and allow us to deal with issues of concern to either of us before such concerns turn into potential trade problems.
We are of course also closely following the reform process in China and have proposed to launch a series of dialogues to offer our experience. Such dialogues could focus on industrial policy, competition policy, education or human resource development. I am looking forward to explore possibilities in this regard during my visit.
These are all areas, of course, where the public sector has a crucial role in both of our societies and that brings me to the subject of my speech today: Governance through the increased use of new technologies also referred to as �eGovernance.�
The public sector plays a very important role in both our economies.
The public sector provides for essential services such as healthcare, education, and social security. It deals with income redistribution. It is responsible for structural development, enabling lagging regions or outdated industrial areas to catch up.
The public sector also determines many of the input conditions for companies, such as a skilled workforce and academic excellence. The strengths of an economy require the proper functioning of its public sector.
In any economy the public sector is a major actor. In the European Union government revenues account for 45% of GDP. Government consumption, that is, government as a purchaser, represents over 20% of GDP.
Challenges to the public sector
In Europe as in many other parts of the world, the public sector is at crossroads, facing challenging economic and social conditions, institutional changes and the profound impact of new technologies.
Public administrations are challenged to improve the efficiency, productivity and the quality of their services. Citizens expect faster public service delivery and less waiting in a queue in front of a counter.
Companies want administrative burden to be reduced, so that they can be more competitive. Public administrations need to raise productivity in order to be able to deliver such better and faster services within tight budgets.
In Europe a major challenge to the public sector is to contribute to boosting economic growth. Economic growth is key in order to realise Europe's strategy for economic, social and environmental renewal.
Public administrations need to be prepared for emerging challenges as well.
In Europe there will be important demographic changes. One factor is the aging of the population. The public sector will have to do with fewer employees and fewer working taxpayers as well, while still having to provide largely the same number of services at better quality.
Another factor is increasing immigration. Maximising the positive effects of immigration will require more efforts by the public sector in integration services, from language training to support for ethnic entrepreneurship.
Another challenge for the future is that citizens will increasingly expect authorities to safeguard liberty, justice and security. This will amongst others imply stepping up international cooperation.
The Internal Market in Europe has brought free movement of people, goods, services and capital across the 15 and soon 25 Member States. With increasing mobility within Europe, for labour, educational or social reasons, greater demands will arise for pan-European public services for citizens and companies as part of deepening the Internal Market.
These are just a few of the challenges to the public sector. Some of them are specific to Europe, others hold true worldwide, or have a strong international dimension.
eGovernment and eGovernance
Information and communication technologies (ICT) can help governments to cope with these numerous challenges.
However, the focus should not be on ICT itself. Instead it should be on the use of ICT combined with organisational change and new skills with a view to improve public services, democratic processes and public policies. This is how we define eGovernment.
eGovernment is therefore not a goal in itself. It is a tool for public sector reform, enabling the public sector to strengthen good governance in the knowledge society. This means:
- Firstly, a public sector that is open and transparent. Administrations should be more understandable and accountable to citizens.
- Secondly, a public sector that is at the service for all. A user-centred public sector will, exclude no one from its services and respect everyone as an individual, by providing personalised services.
- Third, a productive public sector that delivers maximum value for taxpayers' money.
The objectives are ambitious. But already today good practices in many countries show that eGovernment is a powerful means indeed to deliver better quality public services, reduce waiting times and improve cost-effectiveness, raise productivity, and improve transparency and accountability.
Open government - reinforcing democracy
Information and communication technology and especially the Internet is a great tool to make governments more open and transparent.
ICT can make governments more relevant to citizens by increasing participation and involvement in decision-making.
eGovernment is also the way to increase accountability. ICT makes it possible to follow all administrative steps. To see where decisions are prepared and made. Know who is responsible.
The European Commission actively uses public on-line consultation as part of its Better Regulation Approach.
Inclusive and personalised services
The public sector should provide all-inclusive services. Governments cannot choose their clients, they have to serve all. Whether the citizens are IT-literate or not, living in cities or in remote rural areas, having special needs due to disability or not.
ICT indeed makes information better accessible. But not everyone wants to use a PC or can afford one.
Therefore public services should also be provided on all platforms PCs, television, mobile terminal and on public access points. Such a multi-platform approach is part of our eEurope 2005 Action Plan.
eGovernment is also well suited to provide personalised services by bringing information together from various sources.
Personalisation is a great time saver. But it requires common approaches to safeguard privacy and needs interoperability between administrations.
An example of citizen-focus is the portal for citizens of the Austrian government where citizens can get information about many public services and use a smart card or mobile phone to pay for such services, where needed.
Value for taxpayers' money
Productivity matters. In the public sector as much as anywhere else in the economy. Productivity growth is the only sustainable source of increase in real incomes and welfare. A more productive public sector means better use of public finance, through higher efficiency.
ICT is a powerful enabler for productivity growth. The key condition, however, is that investment in ICT is combined with investment in re-organisation of public administrations and improvement of skills of civil servants.
A more productive public sector will also benefit the private sector and make companies more competitive. By eGovernment we can cut the red tape that is bothering companies.
Increased productivity means more time for personal contact, less standing in line, less time in front of the screen.
A few examples of increased productivity and efficiency are:
- The national public procurement agency in Denmark has doubled its productivity and completely eliminated complaints, through electronic tendering.
- The Romanian national procurement system reports savings of 20%.
- The Swedish Virtual Customs Office processes 90% of all declarations electronically and deals through automated clearance for 70% of the declarations within 3 minutes.
Understandably then, the European Commission has taken a strong interest in eGovernment for the modernisation of the public sector.
eGovernment is one of the pillars of our eEurope information society action plan.
The eEurope Action Plan has already helped to raise Internet access in Europe, which is up from less than 20% in 2000 to more than 45% today. The focus of eEurope now is on the one hand on stimulating the roll-out of fast and more secure Internet. Half of all Internet connections should be broadband by 2005. On the other hand eEurope promotes the provision of attractive content, services and applications, in areas such as eHealth, eLearning, and notably also eGovernment.
All European countries have been developing eGovernment plans and strategies over the past few years. Progress has been made in all countries in bringing public services online, with average online availability growing from 45% to 60% from October 2001 to October 2002. Several European countries are in the top league of eGovernment worldwide.
At this stage differences between countries are perhaps less important than growth rates and strategic commitment to modernising public administrations, which can result in rapid progress over the coming years.
Online presence is of course no guarantee for online usage. Of equal importance are awareness of the availability of these services, education of users, and the willingness to use online services.
Above all, it is the real delivery of benefits that counts: how people perceive these services, how they use them, what are the benefits that they experience, and which benefits does eGovernment bring to the administration itself. Such usage-oriented data are currently still relatively scarce.
From a commercial perspective eGovernment is already a sizeable market. In the EU in 2002 about � 30 billion was spent on the ICT part of public administrations, that is, on administrative services only, excluding health, defense, education, etc.
However, ICT spending is only a fraction of the total spending on eGovernment as there is a significant accompanying investment in (re-)organisation and training. Experience from the business world tells us that such investment in organisational capital can be five to ten times as much as the ICT investment.
The need for political leadership and commitment
In public administrations, breaking through barriers between departments and upgrading skills of civil servants are the kind of changes that may well be met with hesitation and even resistance.
Strong political leadership is therefore needed. The changes cannot be left to IT managers. The politicians have to keep reminding of the longer-term vision and at the same time insist on delivering shorter-term concrete results.
The European Commission is soon to present a comprehensive policy and roadmap for eGovernment. This includes an analysis of the contribution of eGovernment to address the many challenges. It also identifies key issues to resolve for a full-scale implementation of eGovernment. Some of these issues include:
- Firstly, ensuring inclusive and widespread access to the Internet so public services are accessible for all. We should invest in multi-platform access, education, implementing Web Accessibility Guidelines.
- Secondly, safeguarding trust and confidence in online interaction with governments. Privacy of data, authentication, and identity management are primary issues where no public service should ever fail.
- Recent cyber-attacks have lifted the importance of the continuity and dependability of public services to the top of the political agenda. Personal data protection, network and information security, the fight against cybercrime and dependability are core policy issues within the EU for which a comprehensive policy has been developed and is further evolving.
- Thirdly, making electronic public procurement easier. This is clearly an area where large gains can be achieved. We are considering legislative and non-legislative measures required for eliminating obstacles to cross-border electronic public procurement and ensuring interoperability of electronic procurements systems.
- Fourth, defining, developing and implementing pan-European services and promoting their use. Already there are some services in place such as Europe-wide job search and access to educational information. But we want to take pan-European services a step further. These services will help to establish true European Citizenship and generate more benefits from the Internal Market.
Finally, we need to know better what eGovernment delivers. It is more difficult to measure productivity in the public sector, but the same logic applies as in the private sector. Namely, higher efficiency means more or better output for a given spending. But it may not be easy to measure outputs in financial terms. Therefore, we will also need to further investigate the economics of eGovernment and develop better approaches to benchmarking.
The actions to address these issues include exchange of good practices, support from R&D, piloting and implementation programmes, and above all the initiatives and action plans at national, regional and local level.
Exchange and transfer of good practices internationally can stimulate learning from each other. This can thereby become a contribution to global cooperation in eGovernment, a priority in the World Summit on the Information Society.
Economic cooperation and technical assistance, including through R&D projects, could be considered with EU partners, notably in relation to capacity-building.
After last year's successful Euro-China Cooperation Forum on the Information Society interesting ideas have been raised for cooperation related to the 2008 Digital Olympics and the eGOV Action Plan of the city of Beijing. I am looking forward to taking stock of this issue with the Vice Mayor tomorrow.
The National Indicative Programme (2002-2004) agreed by the European Commission and the Government of the People's Republic of China in 2001, reflects the European Commission's willingness to contribute to the modernisation and liberalisation of the Chinese economy through its integration into the world Information Society.
Support for China's efforts to participate in the Information Society is also a key feature in the context of WTO co-operation and for reducing the Digital Divide.
Conclusions
Already today eGovernment is proving that it can help public administrations to become more productive and offer personalised services for all, in an open and transparent way.
The benefits of eGovernment can go far beyond bringing services online, provided that public administrations adapts their organisation and acquire new skills.
There are many barriers to overcome and sizable investments will be needed. We need to achieve a change of mindset, towards a public service that puts the citizen at the centre. The public sector should be enabled to be an active contributor to economic and societal progress.
European projects such as the pan-European services in that sense can play a catalyst role, perhaps not dissimilar from the Digital Olympics project here in China.
Political leadership and commitment is essential, in order to keep the longer-term vision in mind, overcome obstacles and ensure concrete deliverables.
eGoverment and proper governance in the knowledge society by means of ICT hold great potential for international cooperation. We have much to learn from each other for a better future for our societies and economies.
Regarding the political and economic relations between Europe and China in general, I am convinced that through a further reinforcement of our co-operation the European Union and China will be better able to promote our shared visions and interest.
It gives me great pleasure to be back in China and I am looking forward to exploring ways to further deepen our successful dialogues of products, services and policies that are so important to the successful development of both of our economies.
Quelle: Tenders Direct, 19.09.2003
