Clean and Affordable Energy within Sustainable Development Goals: The Role of Governance Digitalization

Abstract

Achieving sustainable development goals depends on governance effectiveness within the penetration of digital technologies in all spheres and levels. Furthermore, the energy sector is a crucial inhibitor of sustainable development that depends on the efficacy of digital public services. In this case, the paper aims at analyzing the impact of e-governance on achieving sustainable development goals, particularly on affordable and clean energy. The object of research is EU countries in the period 2013–2019. The data are compiled from the databases of Eurostat, the World Data Bank, and the Sustainable Development Report. The study applies the following methods: the taxonomy method to measure the e-governance index, the fixed effect, the random effect, and a pooled OLS regression model to check the impact of e-governance on affordable and clean energy. The results outlined the leaders (Estonia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Latvia, and Malta) and the outsiders (Romania, Croatia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Poland) in e-governance in 2019. The findings confirm the statistically positive impact of e-governance on extending affordable and clean energy. Thus, improving e-governance by 1 point causes the growth of renewable energy on average by 4.4 points. Furthermore, the industrial structures’ improvement allows increasing renewable energy on average by 0.4 and the trade activization (economic openness) contributes to an increase of renewable energy on average by 0.1. The democracy level does not have a statistically significant impact on achieving sustainable development goals for EU countries. The empirical results show that the countries with high values of e-governance (Sweden, Latvia, Finland, Denmark, and Austria) achieve the highest values of the SDG7 Index Score. Thus, within EU countries, governance digitalization is the strategic inhibitor of SDG achievement.