Previous articles in this series:
Why local elections are more important than they seem: the territory no one is arguing about;
The territory does not start anew after each reform;
Self-government without a self-sustaining economy;
The Road: From the Logic of the Colony to the Logic of Development.
The Mayor as a Deficit Manager
A Depressed Region: A Map Without a Future
Each region has its own scenario
The periphery is not simply the distance from the capital
All of this is, of course, necessary. Digital services can indeed make governance faster, more transparent, and more convenient. People don’t have to travel halfway across the district to get a document. Some services can be accessed remotely. It’s hard to argue with that. Moreover, it’s pointless to argue.
The problem begins when digitization is passed off as regional development.
Because an online government portal doesn’t create jobs. A public services portal doesn’t replace a road. A digital signature does not create a labor market. An integrated registry does not keep young people in the region. The internet does not turn raw materials into value-added products.
Digitalization can make life easier for a region. But it cannot replace a region’s economy.
This is especially important for Moldova because we tend to confuse administrative convenience with development. If digital services appear, it means the region is moving toward the future.
But a region’s future isn’t measured solely by the number of digital services. It is measured by whether the region has jobs, a revenue base, businesses, manufacturing, people who want to stay, roads, water, energy, logistics, education, healthcare, a labor market, and the ability to generate added value and keep it within the region.
If these elements are missing, digitalization becomes little more than a neat facade for the problems of the past. This effectively locks the entire system in place. Poverty, too, takes on a digital form—the wait time for an “e-certificate” confirming that a person is struggling is getting shorter.
These are not arguments against digitalization. These are arguments against a false substitution.
Proper digitalization should be part of a regional strategy. It should support the economy, governance, education, healthcare, transportation, agriculture, business, and social services. It should help a region make better use of its resources.
But if a region has no economic function, digitization merely perpetuates poverty. It’s like installing a good GPS in a car without an engine. The screen lights up, the route is plotted, and the voice confidently says, “Keep moving.” But the car is stationary, and we continue to look optimistically at how the navigation system works.
In Moldova, e-services, databases, and services for citizens and businesses are actively developing. According to 2026 data, 39.67% of municipal administrations are already connected to the e-APL platform. This is important. It can truly reduce administrative costs and make interactions with the government less humiliating and less paper-intensive.
But the administrative accessibility of a service does not equate to regional development. An online service does not equal a job. If young people are leaving, submitting an application online won’t bring them back.
This is where the main difference between e-government and the digital economy lies.
E-government is when a service, document, application, registry, or communication is converted into digital form.
The digital economy is when the methods of production, sales, logistics, management, training, cooperation, market entry, product development, and revenue generation change.
The former can be useful even in a poor region. The latter requires a supportive economic environment.
If a region has businesses, cooperatives, farmers, processors, logistics, export channels, and local initiatives, digitization yields tangible results. It will help with record-keeping, crop forecasting, inventory management, product sales, product certification, customer acquisition, and transportation coordination.
But if none of this exists, digitalization becomes nothing more than a showcase.
This also applies to education. Digital education enhances mobility rather than local development. It helps people leave their communities better prepared. For the individual, this may be an opportunity. For the region, it is yet another loss.
This also applies to local government: if a mayor lacks funds, specialists, a project team, an economic plan, and a tax base, digitalization will not ensure development.
In this sense, digitalization merely masks the problem. Behind electronic services lie unemployment, depopulation, and other issues.
Moldovan administrative reform often uses digitalization as an argument in favor of consolidation or the transfer of functions to higher levels of government.
A small mayor’s office cannot cope—therefore, some services can be moved online, centralized, and made accessible through platforms.
There is a grain of truth in this. But if this logic becomes the dominant one, a danger arises: local self-government gradually turns into an interface between the citizen and the central government. A person sits in a village, presses a button, and a service arrives from the center. Is it convenient? Yes.
But where is the local economy in this model? Where is local decision-making? Digital centralization can reduce the administrative burden, but it can also increase dependence. The mayor’s office becomes not a center of local agency, but an access point to an external system.
True digitalization of a region must be two-way. It should not only deliver services from the top down but also boost the local economy from the bottom up. It should help producers sell their goods, farmers form cooperatives, and businesses manage orders. It should help universities collaborate with businesses; mayors access economic data; investors understand potential sites; and residents receive services and choose to stay in the region because it becomes a place worth living in.
Digitalization should not answer an abstract question: How many services have been moved online? It should answer the question: What function of the region does it enhance? If there is no function, there will be no result.
Case Study: Comrat: A Digital Facade Hiding Structural Emptiness
The example of Comrat clearly illustrates this problem. The problem is that the city has not established its economic function.
Digital educational platforms, online courses, and electronic libraries can improve the quality of education for students at Comrat State University. But they won’t solve the main question: where will these people work after graduation?
Comrat’s garment factories can also be digitized: order tracking, production management, quality control, logistics, and communication with external customers. But if the region remains at the lower end of the value chain, carrying out operations based on orders from others, digitization will improve discipline and speed but will not ensure development.
The issue isn’t just how digitized production is. The issue is who controls the design, the brand, the orders, the market, the margins, and product development.
Digitizing the Comrat City Hall will make its work cleaner, more transparent, and faster. That’s good. But it won’t create a single new job in the real sector. It won’t retain a single KSU graduate. It won’t launch a single processing line.
Comrat needs more than just a digital city administration. It needs to digitize its development strategy.
If the strategy is to become a modern agro-industrial, educational, and logistics hub for the south, then digitization must work toward precisely that: agricultural data, processing, logistics, certification, exports, workforce training, university-business collaboration, online platforms for producers, infrastructure management, and investment projects.
If, however, digitalization is limited to e-services, it will become easier for people to obtain documents. But if, after receiving the document, they leave anyway because there are no jobs in the city—that’s just a well-organized farewell.
For Moldova as a whole, the conclusion is the same. The country needs digitalization, but not digitalization instead of development. We need e-services, but not at the expense of jobs. We need registries, but not instead of a tax base.
Otherwise, we’ll end up with a strange situation: the state becomes digital, while the region remains depressed. Documents are processed faster, but people leave just as quickly.
First, we need to understand what role the region should play in the country’s economy. Then—what digital tools are needed specifically for that role. Different ones for agricultural processing. Logistics requires different ones. A suburban agglomeration requires yet others. An industrial site requires a third set. A university center requires a fifth set. An aging rural community requires a sixth set.
If, however, we first implement universal platforms and then hope that they will drive development on their own, we’ll end up with yet another Moldovan fairy tale about modernization: there’s a website, but no future.
Eugen Perestoronin,
journalist, economic and political analyst
Dmitri Taraburca,
economist, expert in real estate and territorial development
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