eGovernance study at EU / Member State level

The eGovernance project was triggered by the Commission’s Action Programme for reducing administrative burden on businesses. The main objective of this Action Programme was to reduce administrative burden by 25% by 2012. One of the recommendations that came forth is the introduction of the eGovernance concept for Rural Development measures. eGovernance entails the introduction and use of online portals, electronic submission of documents and pre-filled forms so that beneficiaries can follow-up the status of their files.3.The aim of the ‘eGovernance study at EU / Member State level’ is to gather both quantitative and qualitative information on the existing Member State IT systems in the Rural Development policy domain in order to enable the European Commission to help Member States to assess the impact of the new IT requirements contained in the new Rural Development Regulation for the next programming period for the eGovernance project in their own IT systems. The response rate during the data collection phase of the project was high. In the course of the project, responses from 44 funding programmes covering 25 Member States (43 regions) throughout Europe were received, representing a coverage of 92% of the Member States. It should be noted that although this percentage is high, this does not mean that all regions in a Member State have been covered. It should also be noted that differences in terms of level of detail and quality of the information delivered were noticed. All in all, the gathered information provided a sufficient basis for analysis.