Governments around the world are making active efforts to encourage entrepreneurship. At the same time, governments have also embraced digital technology, particularly the online delivery of government services. This paper examines the effect of offering government services online on the ease of setting up new businesses around the world. Panel data from almost 200 countries between 2002 and 2010 were assembled from multiple public databases and analyzed with fixed-effects regression models in STATA to measure how bringing more government services online affected the number of procedures required to start a new business, as well as the time and cost of these procedures. In this first multi-country time-series study of the effect of e-Government on entrepreneurship, free from the biases of cross-sectional studies, we find that providing more government services online did indeed make it easier to start up business, as did improvements in the ICT infrastructure and education level of the country. We find that the online delivery of government services benefited entrepreneurs by reducing the number of procedures needed to start a business, and by reducing the time and cost of these procedures. Our study provides strong evidence for the positive effect of e-Government on entrepreneurship.

世界各国政府都在积极鼓励企业家精神。同时，政府还接受了数字技术，特别是政府服务的在线交付。本文研究了在线提供政府服务对在全球范围内开展新业务的便利性的影响。2002年至2010年期间，从多个公共数据库收集了来自近200个国家/地区的面板数据，并使用STATA中的固定效应回归模型进行了分析，以衡量将更多的政府服务投入在线如何影响开展新业务所需的程序数量以及这些程序的时间和成本。在这项关于电子政务对企业家精神影响的第一个多国家时间序列研究中，我们没有横断面研究的偏见，发现确实，更多的在线政府服务确实使开办企业变得更加容易，该国的ICT基础设施和教育水平也得到了改善。我们发现，通过减少创业所需的程序数量以及减少这些程序的时间和成本，政府服务的在线交付使企业家受益。我们的研究为电子政务对企业家精神的积极影响提供了有力的证据。