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1. Introduction

Electronic commerce in both the public and the private sector involves a broad area of administrative processes and documents. A conventional dilemma for the government is whether to intervene in the diffusion and character of EDI or whether to rely on market forces to determine the manifestation of electronic commerce. In most modern economies, this ideological twist is confronted with the reality of governments' large share of the gross domestic product, which, as a consequence, both directly and indirectly affects the economy through purchasing volume, fiscal authority, etc.

This paper is concerned with why and how the Danish government attempts to stimulate the diffusion of EDI (Ministry of Research and Information Technology, 1996), thereby facilitating electronic commerce at large. Our group has initiated a continued monitoring of EDI-usage in Denmark. The initial results from this monitoring describe the developing usage of EDI from 1995 to 1998 within and between both the private and the public sector (Andersen and others, 1998b).

It has been suggested that there has been an uptake of Internet based business-to-business traffic for the period 1995-1997 and that the VANS operator has been a victim and unaware of this development. EDIFACT should be in the defensive and decreasing. It has also been questioned whether the public sector has been a proactive player in the diffusion of EDI. Finally, small and medium-sized enterprises should be the victims of the EDI use. We have, however, not been able to verify any of these hypothesis.

To distinguish between standards for EDI messages, the means and ownership of transport channels, the technology used in transport channels, and the integration of EDI within the IT systems of the businesses involved, a typology for EDI is presented in Section 2. The governmental instruments are briefly discussed in Section 3, whereas Section 4 presents the Danish background and the national EDI strategy. We evaluate this strategy in Section 8 based upon the survey data presented in Section 5 and examples of EDI implementation in Sections 6 and 7.

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@ Juul, Andersen & Bjørn-Andersen: Electronic Commerce in Denmark, Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce, Boston, September 1998. >Bottom of current sections</