Public Administration Digitalisation and Microenterprise Productivity in India

We find that public administration digitalisation, carried out state-by-state in India between 2010 and 2015, led to an improvement in micro-enterprise productivities, based on the Unincorporated Non-Agricultural Enterprises Surveys. We categorise the digitalisation of public administration into six groups: tax filing and payments, construction permits, environment and labour regulations, inspections, commercial disputes, and single-window systems. States are ranked according to the subsets of digitalisation carried out by them. Using the difference-in-difference estimations with propensity score matching, we find that the average firm-level productivities have risen in the states carrying out more digitalisation. There, also, dispersions in productivities have become narrower.