During all the US election news, I missed a good story in the International Herald Tribune on the country of Macedonia’s push toward E-Government:

A lucrative annual permit to haul freight across the border between this Balkan country and Greece used to cost Macedonian truckers as much as €2,500 in bribes per vehicle.

But that changed two years ago, when the Ministry of Transport and Communications adopted a computer system to electronically assign licenses. Now truckers pay only about €100, or about $127, in application fees for a cross-border license. And the annual two-week period for license applications closed in October with no sign of the angry crowds of truckers who used to picket outside government offices here.

“We trust the system – we trust the computer,” Blagoja Voinov, who owns a dozen 40-ton trucks, said through a translator.

I visited Macedonia to speak on promoting E-Government in 2004 via a program sponsored by US AID. At that time, there was a big discussion about the old guard civil servants who had no use for E-Government not so much because it assured them bribe money, but because it outdated their skills as bureaucrats. This is an obstacle that exists in Europe and North America at a more subtle level, but something that will need to be recognized if we are to succeed in promoting E-Government and E-Democracy.

I am glad to see that progress was made on some fronts in Macedonia. Now we need to see what we can learn from their experience.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 4:20 pm and is filed under CDT, Consumer Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.