Ansip advocates creating an integrated European Union digital marketplace. Photo by the Estonian State Chancellery.

TALLINN — Tiny Estonia has been making headlines and money off the back of its IT boom for years now. From Skype to virtual voting to cyber-defense, it has won a reputation as a hub of hi-tech excellence – not least because of some canny self-promotion from Enterprise Estonia.

At this month’s Baltic Development Forum in Vilnius, Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip called for Estonia’s e-revolution to go global with the creation of an integrated European Union-wide digital marketplace. Baltic Reports spoke to him a week later at the World Forum for Foreign Direct Investment in Tallinn where he outlined his vision of the future.

Baltic Reports: In Vilnius you said the EU should create a single digital marketplace open to all member states – and others. Why is this important?

Andrus Ansip: It’s important not only for Estonia but for everybody. In Estonia it’s common to use internet-based e-solutions. Ninety-nine percent of all bank transactions are made via internet banks. 92 percent of personal income tax declarations are made using e-tax portals.

We have e-elections, e-police, e-health, e-schools systems. It’s quite easy to create a new company via the internet using your ID card and digital signature. It takes for some people two hours and for other people 12 minutes to create a new company.

People from Portugal and Finland can also create companies her without even visiting Estonia. But for other people in the EU it’s impossible — for example an Estonian cannot create a company in Germany using a digital signature.

We use a mobile phone parking system here — why can’t Finnish people also pay for parking here using their mobile phones? The problem is that there are different regulations in all 27 EU member states. Standardization and unification is needed in this area.

BR: Is there some national trait that makes Estonians particularly fond of the internet?

Ansip: Everyone talks about innovative Estonians. But perhaps it is also true that we are just lazy people. We like all kinds of easy solutions. Sometimes it is raining or snowing so we just like to stay inside and use our computers.

In fact did you know it is not allowed for the government to ask for the same information from citizens twice? For example when a young mother wants to get maternity allowance from the government she has to send an application via the internet. Then the government knows she has a baby, the government knows about her previous salary already.

BR: How quickly can such a marketplace be created? The EU is not renowned for moving fast, but the ICT sector is…

Ansip: Developments in the IT sector are very rapid so if we start to pay attention to it – it will support not only the ICT sector but economic developments in the whole EU in all sectors. Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands all have similar ideas. We don’t want to see those kind of trade barriers in place.

It’s common to use internet solutions in Estonia but we didn’t give any state aid to our people to buy computers. Our policy was to provide more and more services via the internet and our people understood that it is a much more efficient use of time and funds to use internet solutions than to visit offices, stand in queues, visit different departments, collect stamps and so on.

People were really interested to use internet solutions. I don’t think people in other countries are somehow different — they would also like to use them. If it is possible to use internet-based e-solutions in some member states, why not in others?

We have more and more digital services available every day and we have to destroy those barriers dividing us. Why are many American companies not active in European markets? It’s because we don’t have this single market in digital media because we have 27 relatively small markets — but it’s an increasing market.

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