E-GOVERNMENT DEVELOPMENT AND BUSINESS TRANSACTIONAL EXPENDITURE: CROSS-COUNTRY EVIDENCE ON INTEREST RATE SPREAD DISTORTIONS, LOGISTICS PERFORMANCE, AND SERVICES TRADE RESTRICTIVENESS

Digital transformation of the public sector is increasingly relevant because it can reshape the costs firms face in finance, logistics, and cross-border service provision. This study investigates how e-government development and its human-capital, online-service, and telecommunication components influence interest rate spread distortions, logistics performance, and services trade restrictiveness across countries, and whether these effects are linear or non-linear. The analysis uses three unbalanced country panels covering 1,299 observations for 130 countries, 906 observations for 163 countries, and 306 observations for 51 countries, estimated with two-way fixed-effects models and Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, with robustness checks and quadratic specifications implemented in R. The results show that a 0.1-point increase in EGDI is associated with an approximately 0.45-point reduction in the absolute interest rate spread, while the robustness coefficient remains negative at-0.677. Human capital and telecommunication infrastructure are especially important in this dimension, with baseline coefficients of-3.921 and-1.910, respectively. In the logistics specification, aggregate EGDI is insignificant, but HCI is positive and significant (β = 0.372), and a 0.1-point increase in HCI raises the Logistics Performance Index by about 0.037 points. In the services-trade specification, EGDI reduces STRI by-0.095. At the same time, HCI shows a U-shaped effect with a turning point at 0.975, indicating that digital human capital lowers restrictiveness up to very high levels before the relationship turns upward.