How Does Digital Government Promote Government Efficiency——Evidence from Automatic Government Service Machine

In recent years, China has attached great importance to the Development of Digital Government. One of the typical practices is to introduce the Automatic Government Service Machine (AGSM hereafter) to provide enterprises with whole-process administrative approval service. These AGSMs serve the intention of making administrative approval process automated and uniform, delivering a new choice to be chosen from within the government-corporate administrative approval affairs. In this paper, we study the general equilibrium effects on how introducing these machines affect administrative approval efficiency, and the mechanism behind such effects. In theory, we show that introducing the AGSMs can offer a productive tunnel for administrative approval affairs on top of the men-supervised windows, increasing the supply of approval services, thus relieving the burden of human-supervised windows, and increasing the general efficiency. Empirically, utilizing data collected from 24 provinces and 110 cities, we find robust results echoing our theoretical deductions, that is, the number of approvals on average increases by 13%, and the time in dealing such administrative affairs decreases by 11%. Overall, we conclude that the AGSMs are a fundamental outreach innovation that improves the administrative approval process efficiency.