This brief presents the 2025 update of the GovTech Maturity Index (GTMI), offering a global snapshot of public sector digital transformation across 197 economies. The GTMI assesses four focus areas, Core Government Systems (CGSI), Online Public Service Delivery (PSDI), Digital Citizen Engagement...

Collective bargaining has a marginal and steadily diminishing role in employment regulation in Hungary. Flaws in the legal framework are certainly among the main reasons behind low and decreasing coverage. In the light of ILO standards and comparative national examples, this article analyses the...

This paper investigates the labour market consequences of motherhood in Italy, with a focus on how institutional and local contexts shape the child penalty. Using administrative data from the Italian National Social Security Institute (INPS), we track the labour market trajectories of mothers in...

Technological advances are increasingly influencing how the public sector makes decisions according to citizens' needs and the community's problems. The need for a solution that facilitates the fast adaptation of administration to social context and people's feedback becomes mandatory in order...

Public-sector innovation is frequently portrayed as the domain of dedicated innovation labs and experimental units, obscuring how innovation capacity can emerge within core bureaucratic institutions. This article explores how Norway's Brønnøysund Register Centre (BRC), mainly a registry...

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed significant vulnerabilities in public-sector administrative capacity, particularly in the implementation of crisis-related state aid schemes. Under conditions of extreme workload, time pressure, and legal constraints, administrative processes became critical...

Fiscal transparency is a core pillar of open government, yet its implementation at the local level remains uneven. This study investigates how the Open Government Partnership (OGP) contributes to fiscal transparency as a form of public sector innovation through a comparative analysis of local...

This study systematically reviews 53 peer-reviewed articles on public sector innovation published between 2021 and 2025 to synthesize knowledge on how innovation is conceptualized, triggered, enacted, and constrained. Findings reveal that innovation is framed across technological,...

Smart government uses smartphones to provide services to beneficiaries. Organizations face huge obstacles in their attempts to create an efficient methodology for smart government transformation because of the need for successful strategies. Enterprise resource planning and cloud computing are...

Functional analysis (FA) is increasingly used in public sector reforms to assess organizational performance and guide administrative change. However, FA frequently stays procedural and descriptive in both theory and practice, providing little insight into the roots of inefficiencies. The paper...

This study offers a descriptive analysis of complex thinking as a form of cognitive competency among a group of 52 public servants holding local leadership positions in the Philippines. By extending the empirical examination of complex thinking beyond educational contexts and into local public...

A long-established and widely used approach to management in government has been the transmission of information up a hierarchy, and centralized decision-making and oversight; colloquially known as 'command and control'. This paper examines accountability in such a system implemented at scale in...

This paper incorporates labor market inactivity and long-term unemployment into the framework of optimal redistributive taxation. We examine how a combination of education policy, public employment programs, unemployment benefits, and optimal income taxation can effectively address both...

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has emerged as a foundational enabler of modern digital governance, yet scholarly understanding of its scope, design, and impact remains fragmented. This study addresses this gap by conducting a comprehensive systematic review and bibliometric analysis of 1153...

Using household survey data on expenditures and incomes, we construct an objective measure of corruption in the public sector for a broad spectrum of countries. Specifically, we focus on the consumption-income gap for public sector workers relative to private sector workers to gauge the extent...

Digital transformation has become a central strategy for modernizing the public sector. This study analyzes the relationships between digital competencies, digital literacy, change management, soft skills, technology adoption, digitization of the public function, digital public services,...

Identifying what motivates public servants and how those motives vary across agencies is essential for both theory and practice, yet most existing "types of bureaucrats" remain untested against real workforces. Drawing on reputation theory, which posits that external audiences' beliefs shape who...

This study aimed to examine the effect of public policies on talent retention in the Portuguese Public Administration and whether the participants' managerial status moderates this relationship. A total of 282 individuals, active workers in public administration, participated in this study, with...

GovTech - the special topic of this edition - has the potential to act as a critical lever for boosting public sector productivity and sustaining Malaysia's transition to a digitally driven, high-income economy, which in turn will enable private sector growth and higher quality jobs for...

This study focuses on self-service technologies (SST) in the public sector in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), aiming to address ethical concerns arising from the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) and enrich various facets of SST that have not been addressed previously in the...

Digital transformation in government services represents a strategic shift that leverages digital technologies to enhance efficiency, accessibility, convenience, and user-centricity. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments accelerated the digitisation of services to support remote...

This article examines the Participatory Fiscal Control System (SCFP) of the Colombian Comptroller General's Office as an institutional innovation in democratic oversight. While participatory audit mechanisms have expanded globally, the literature still lacks empirical analyses of how Supreme...

The objective of this study is to conduct an analysis of the efficiency and productivity of a thermal power generation plant in the Indian public sector. This analysis has been carried out using the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology, focusing on the period from 2014-15...

The Ultra-Micro (UMi) financing program represents a significant public sector innovation in Indonesia's approach to poverty alleviation and financial inclusion. Initially conceived as a social assistance initiative, UMi has evolved into a strategic government intervention designed to transform...