Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Envying Estonia's Digital Government

The only reason more countries aren't adopting Estonia's e-government system is the absence of political will.

March 4, 2015 at 12:14 PM EST

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

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The most striking thing about Estonia's e-government system isn't the way it allows anyone to file taxes, vote, or receive a medical prescription, all in a matter of minutes and from a single website. The technology behind it is smart, but not magical. The real surprise is that more countries have yet to build similar systems of their own.

Estonia started planning a move to digital government in 1997. By 2001, the shape of the future system was outlined in a master's thesis written by Arne Ansper, a programmer working for a small Tallinn company called Cybernetica. He had the idea of building a distributed system, in which government departments and private companies could engage in secure peer-to-peer information exchange.

Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal

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