Paper abstract:

The paper investigates whether the online provision of government services makes it easier to start up new businesses in developing Central Asian economies, in terms of the number of regulatory procedures, time, and costs of starting business. To address the research objectives, firstly, the paper starts with a comprehensive review of the role of government in entrepreneurship and arguments about how e-government might support entrepreneurship. Second, after set of hypotheses are developed based on relevant literature and theoretical arguments, to test the relationship between e-government and ease of starting a new business, empirical analysis (fixed-effect regression) is employed. While the primary focus of the paper is the e-government services to facilitate new venture creation, the impacts of other factors that related to entrepreneurship regulating environment and exist independently of e-government, particularly the quality of regulation, contract enforcement, rule of law, and the control of corruption, are controlled. In addition, effects of overall technological infrastructure (telecommunication, internet connectivity) and soft skills development (human development index) on entrepreneurship are tested.

A panel data used to measure e-government development, human capital, and telecommunication index of the selected economies, including, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, obtained from UN E-Government Knowledgebase. In addition, the country-specific data of individual countries are acquired from the World Development Indicators data set, and World Governance Indicators is going to serve as a source of data for measuring the regulatory and institutional effectiveness of the countries in the sample.

The key objective pursued by this study is to contribute to the discussions around the aspects of digitalization of government services and entrepreneurship in emerging economies of Central Asia. Although in academic literature, debates around the small and medium-sized enterprises are based on the premise that they are base for private sector-led growth and emerging private sector of developing economies, there is lack of scholarly study on entrepreneurship in Central Asian economies. In practice, in Central Asian countries, government is considered as a body that impede entrepreneurship, administrative complexity is perceived as an environmental barrier, hinders private sector development, and regulation is viewed as a factor, which imposes a burden on firms, particularly new entrants, potentially deterring entrepreneurial entry. Therefore, empirical investigation of this issue comes up with significant contribution to relevant literature and important implications for policymakers.