Public sector efficiency is a productivity input. Politics is a separate debate. When government processes are slow, the cost lands as lost economic output, delayed business formation, and reduced service access for citizens who can least afford to wait. Inconvenience is the least of it.

The mechanism is straightforward. Every administrative delay imposes a holding cost on the entity waiting. A business that takes four months to register instead of four days loses the output of those months. A permit that takes a year instead of a week freezes capital. These costs are invisible in government accounting but real in national productivity.

Digital public services change the equation. E-government infrastructure correlates with GDP growth because it compresses the time between intention and action. The mechanism is temporal compression. Digitisation's inherent virtue, whatever that would mean, does not enter the equation. When a business can form in hours, when a citizen can access services without queuing, the administrative layer stops being a drag and starts being a multiplier.

The countries that understand this treat government technology as economic infrastructure, on par with roads and ports. The countries that do not treat it as a cost centre and wonder why their private sectors underperform.

Over to you

How many days does it take to register a business in your country? That number is a rough proxy for how seriously your government treats its role as economic infrastructure.

End of transmission