An Overview of Digital Signing and the Influencing Factors in Estonian Local Governments

摘要

In Estonia, digital signing was started with Digital Signatures Act already in 2000, so that for years, the priority of the state has been to make digital signing and its use with various types of documents more efficient. This article provides a study of the use of digital signatures with documents related to decision-making processes and analyses the factors which influence this. Local governments have been used as an example to provide an overview of the digital signing statistics for local government document exchange. The article high-lights the differences related to the size and administrative capacity of the local governments as well as their readiness to transition into the information society.