Farewell to Myth: Digitization of Employment Injury Insurance Services and Citizen Utilization

It has been widely acknowledged within the academic community that the efficacy of citizen acceptance of digitized public services has proven to be suboptimal and even disillusioning. For instance, Ma and Zheng (2018) conducted an empirical study on thirty-two European countries and discovered that citizens did not frequently utilize better-maintained government websites and, instead, they continued to rely on traditional methods and “still queued up to stay away from e-services.” The acceptance, adoption, and usage of e-government or digital government services by citizens are still considered elusive goals or myths(Bekkers and Homburg, 2007).

Undoubtedly, technology has significantly contributed to driving a governmental transformation over time (Dunleavy et al., 2006). Nevertheless, it is imperative to consider the governance structure as well as the socio-economic context within which technological advancements occur. The oversimplified assumption that expensive and resource-intensive digital services will inherently result in widespread acceptance and utilization by citizens requires careful consideration (Meijer and Bolivar, 2016; van den Berg et al., 2020). The criticality of reflecting on citizens' adoption and utilization of digital public services cannot be overstated in order to achieve citizen-centric digital services (Barbosa et al., 2013). This study aims to address this issue.

In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis to determine the likelihood of citizen adoption and usage of a specific digital public service. With regards to costs, our primary focus is on the administrative burdens. In terms of benefits, in addition to tangible advantages such as increased monetary subsidies, we also emphasize intangible benefits such as enhancing citizens' trust and combating corruption.

Subsequently, we illustrate the case of participation in industrial injury insurance with representative significance and we construct a continuous difference-in-differences (DID) framework for a counterfactual assessment. Our findings reveal that digital public services account for approximately 182% of the expansion in industrial injury insurance coverage, primarily driven by provinces with higher proportions of educated individuals and higher GDP. However, when we advance the treatment year-by-year under conditions whereby digital public services are absent but overall policy trends remain unchanged, this effect becomes statistically insignificant. Consequently, we interpret digital public services as “boosters,” “catalysts,” or “accelerators” rather than as playing decisive roles. We employ the Synthetic DID Method to validate our results further, and we obtain robust outcomes. In contrast to prevailing pessimistic literature on this topic, our study provides optimistic evidence regarding the impact of digital public services. However, we contend that this evidence is not solely due to digital public services. Rather, it emanates from an approach centered on citizens' needs and informed policy orientations.