Title: ECONOMIC ASPECTS

Economic Aspects

It is beyond doubt that one of the most important aspects that need to be considered prior to the deployment of eIDs is the economics of any scheme that seeks to be viable. The importance of economics and the underlying issues that are related to accounting for different cost-projections are critical and typically play a fundamental role in decision-making. For the political world, cost-projections and related economic aspects are also extremely important as they often become the source of debate for a variety of reasons, the foremost of which is public spending that is always prone to heavy criticism. As citizens’ expectations are high when tax-collected monetary funds are put to use, research and considerations concerning such schemes becomes extremely important, particularly when public spending escalates towards exorbitant amounts of money that have not been properly considered, or even worse, considerably underestimated. The sheer scale whereby such schemes have to be launched (typically the entire population of a country) means that depending on the complexity of the scheme, there is a distinct possibility that initial estimations concerning cost-projection could be utterly mistaken or considerably dislocated from the end result. Research towards the multitude of issues that influence economic aspects related to eID implementations is therefore necessary, and it is the purpose and target of this section to provide a guide and outline several issues that need to be considered for the implementation and adoption of eID schemes and that should be factored into the economic aspects of implementation.