International bodies and numerous authors advocate a key role for Digital Government (DG) in improving public governance and achieving other policy outcomes. Today, a particularly relevant outcome is advancing Sustainable Governance (SG), i.e., the capacity to steer and coordinate public action towards sustainable development. This article performs an empirical study of the relationship between DG and SG using data about 41 OECD/EU countries from the United Nations’ E-Government Survey and the Bertelsmann’s Sustainable Governance Indicators project, covering the period from 2014 to 2020. We examine if DG progress pairs with SG progress, apply a DEA model to find out which countries are efficient in using DG for better SG, and uncover cases of imbalance where high DG pairs with poor SG and vice versa. The results show that the efficiency in using DG for SG strongly varies, and that some DG leaders persistently fail to advance or even regress their SG. These findings refute the claims about the benign role of DG and points at democracy as the “weak link” in the analyzed relation.

Reliable benchmarking is essential for effective management of the government digitalization efforts. Existing benchmarking instruments generally fail to support this target. One problem is the diversity of instruments, resulting in a split image of digital progress and adding ambiguity to policy decisions. Another problem is disconnect in assessing progress between digital and traditional "analog" governance, lending support to a dangerous idea that countries can compensate for lack of progress in their governance systems by simply digitalizing them. This paper provides a path to addressing both problems by: aggregating relevant indicators of the World Economic Forum's Network Readiness Index (NRI) to obtain a single synthetic measure of digital government, balancing this measure with progress in analog governance using World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), calculating new measures for the latest editions of NRI and WGI, and discussing results. Technically, the paper applies multidimensional linear ordering and factor analysis.

Countries differ in their capacity to develop and use digital technology – some build such capacity locally, others rely on foreign countries and corporations, and yet others do both. While sourcing arrangements may vary, the outcome is critical to countries’ performance – their ability to pursue national goals and priorities. The paper explores the relationship between the countries’ digital dependence and performance, relying on the calculation of the Spearman correlation coefficient between the Digital Dependence Index and the Online Service and E-Participation Indices, for 23 countries in 2020. The calculation established a small to moderate negative correlation between the variables, i.e. the better performance, the lower dependence, in line with theoretical assumptions, and identified cases that violate these assumptions.