Digital public services: Italy’s usage at 55 percent, among the lowest in the EU

Brussels – The EU simplification and digitalization efforts of the public administration appear to be paying off. According to Eurostat, citizens’ use of online government apps and services increased in Europe by 0.7 percentage points in 2024.

According to the data, 70 percent of Europeans aged 16 to 74 said they had logged on to their country’s institutional portals in the past 12 months, a percentage that sharply increases when looking at the best performers: 98.5 percent in Denmark, 96 percent in the Netherlands, and 95.4 percent in Finland.

However, the same does not apply to Italy, which confirms its substantial delay in digitalizing relations between the public administration and citizens and businesses. Only 55.1 percent of Italians interact with public bodies through the Internet, nearly 15 percentage points less than the EU average. On top of that, the trend of the use of digital services in our country is negative, with a drop of 5 percentage points compared to 60.1 in 2023. Eurostat pointed out that Italy is third to last in the EU for online bureaucratic services, followed only by Bulgaria (31.5 percent) and Romania (25.3 percent).

Whether it’s accessing personal information, inquiring about benefits, laws, citizen services or opening hours, or even downloading official documents or sending complaints and requests, Italy, due to the lack of digital skills and obsolescence of the available means, performs worse than the vast majority of the Union and doesn’t seize, to its detriment, the challenge of bureaucratic simplification.