Digital State Capacity

Patrick Healy, Simon D. Angus, Paul Raschky, Klaus Ackermann, Nathan Lane, Weijia Li and Cynthia Huang

No 2026-02, SoDa Laboratories Working Paper Series from Monash University

Abstract: Digital State Capacity is the ability of governments to deploy ICT infrastructure and information systems to implement policy. This paper introduces a new measure of government ICT capacity based on an observable stock of deployable public-sector network infrastructure: public IPv4 address space held by government organisations. These address holdings are key inputs into digital administration because they support internet-facing systems, networked information exchange, and coordination across agencies and functions. The core panel covers approximately 150,000 country-entity records classified as government across more than 150 countries from 2019 to 2024 and can be disaggregated by administrative level and government function. In the 2019 to 2024 Admin-1 panel, government IP holdings are observed in 1,681 subnational regions across all years. We validate the measure at the cross-country and subnational levels and apply it to government tasks related to corruption control and vaccination rollout. In illustrative country-year analysis, higher Digital State Capacity is associated with higher-quality governance and public-service outcomes in the expected directions, including lower measured corruption and higher vaccination coverage. These associations are descriptive; they demonstrate the empirical relevance of the measure and are not causal estimates.

Keywords: state capacity; informational state capacity; digital government; public-sector ICT infrastructure; bureaucratic capacity; subnational government; e-government; IPv4 address space (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 H11 H83 O33 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-08-07
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