Glavan, Oana Raluca

The e-cohesion concept is a new concept introduced within the European Union's policy documents issued in October 2011 for the new financial period of 2013 - 2020 regarding the use of Structural Funds. The concept itself is not yet defined in the proposals for legislative documents and there are not neither any clear measures suggested to the Member States, nor targets for its implementation. The concept is undoubtedly related with the simplification of the management procedures, targeting the submission electronically of all documents requested to the applicants. The main solutions suggested are the digitization of the management authorities, but also the extension of the electronic signature system and the increase of the on-line security for these operations. These developments will engage hopefully a cut of red-tape, the avoidance of duplication and environment friendly procedures. This article intends to contribute to the academic debate related to this new concept and to research how the implementation of the e-cohesion concept might challenge the present systems. A short inventory of some good practices that have already been implemented in several Member States will present an insight on steps already made in this field.

Although over recent years Romania has made significant improvements in the development and extension of broadband networks, according to the European statistics (European Commission, 2011; Colclough et al., 2010), Romania still occupies unwanted last place in the level of Internet use by population (up to 35%) and eGovernment use (less than 10%). Romania finds itself below the EU level in relation to the supply of on-line services for citizens (50%) and for companies (75%). Online sophistication of public services reaches 73% of which sophistication for business services stands at 89%, compared to 94% for the EU 27 plus Croatia, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey (EU27+). Sophistication for citizen services is at 63% (compared to 87% for the EU27+). Despite the low level of progress, there are prospects for extending and improvement of eGovernment services in Romania, mainly to the use of structural funds which might ensure part of the financing of projects. The negative effects of the economic crisis can be overcome by the increase in the level of computerization in the public administration sector, while decreasing costs involving a human factor following recent cuts in personnel. Having regard to the actual level of development of eGovernment in Romania, the main difficulty would be to integrate local initiatives already implemented with on-going national strategies in the field.