Digital government and quality of life: Unpacking the human-centred mechanisms of e-government development

Digital systems are increasingly embedded in everyday life, shaping access to services, institutional interactions, and ultimately human well-being. This study aims to examine how digital government development influences quality of life and to identify the human-centred mechanisms (online services, digital infrastructure, and human capital) through which these effects occur. The analysis is based on a cross-country panel dataset of 76 countries over 2012–2024 (446 observations), using two-way fixed effects models with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, mechanism decomposition, and a Mundlak approach. The results show that e-government development has a strong positive effect on quality of life in the contemporaneous specification (β = 106.45; p < 0.001), while the lagged effect is weaker (β = 25.96; p = 0.075), indicating predominantly immediate impacts. A 0.1 increase in EGDI is associated with an increase of approximately 10.6 points in the Quality of Life Index. Mechanism analysis reveals that online services (β ≈ 31–38; p < 0.001) and digital infrastructure (β ≈ 60–67; p < 0.01) are the primary drivers, whereas human capital is not statistically significant. The Mundlak decomposition confirms that both within-country improvements (β = 122.68; p < 0.05) and between-country differences (β = 62.74; p < 0.001) significantly contribute to quality of life.