Abstract
To explore the determinants of global e-government performance, this paper examines the aggregate data of 163 different countries by conducting multivariate statistical analysis. The results of multivariate regression analysis indicate that the performance of digital government is likely to be determined by economic wealth, education, urbanization, civil liberties, government effectiveness, and the interaction between Internet usage and economic wealth, while the extent of internet penetration alone does not determine e-government performance. More importantly, this study indicates that government effectiveness is much more important than any other factors in determining global e-government performance. The countries with high e-government performance are likely to be the wealthy, developed, and Western countries or the rapidly developing Asian countries.
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Notes
E-government, digital government, and the application of information technology in government are used interchangeably in this paper. E-government refers to the use of information technology and the Internet to provide public services.
Some studies found a significant linkage between gender, race, ethnicity, age, or geography and access to the Internet or information technology. For example, the wealthy, educated, young, male, and white are more likely to use the Internet at home and have a home computer than the poor, uneducated, old, female, African American, and Hispanic (for details, see Mossberger et al. 2003; US Department of Commerce 2002).
It seems that there is no consensus on the definition of e-government performance, what constitutes e-government performance, and how to analyze it. Some researchers focus more narrowly on e-government performance, including usability of the government portals, content on the government portals, and response time of government agencies.
A Kaufmann index of government effectiveness is based on responses on the quality of public service provision, the quality of the bureaucracy, the competence of civil servants, the independence of the civil service from political pressures, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to policies; “the main focus of this index is on “inputs” required for the government to be able to produce and implement good policies and deliver public goods” (Kaufman et al. 2003, 3). Additionally, we need to be cautious in interpreting the data regarding a Kaufmann index of government effectiveness in that “while the addition of data has improved the precision of our governance indicators relative to previous years, the margins of error associated with estimates of governance remain large relative to the units in which governance is measured” (Kaufman et al. 2003, 11).
As an organizational or administrative determinant, some studies used corruption as the independent variable. When corruption is included in the independent variables, the multivariate statistical analysis shows that corruption is not significant. Government effectiveness would be a more appropriate indicator than corruption using political or public power for private gain.
Some studies measured information technology development or government IT development as the number of researchers, including scientists and engineers, working in research and development (R&D) or the percentage of expenditures in R&D to gross domestic product (GDP). A large number of developing countries, however, have not reported data on research and development, and thus the size of cases is reduced to almost half if those variables are included in the independent variables. More precisely, the number of IT researchers or the extent of expenditures in the area of information technology would be more valid than all the researchers in R&D or all the expenditures in R&D.
Of 198 countries the West study published, data of 163 countries are available when all independent variables in this paper are considered. Unfortunately, data of many developing countries are not available. Further, a longitudinal study with a cross-national analysis would be ideal to make causal inferences, but cross-national longitudinal data of global e-government are currently rare.
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Kim, CK. A Cross-national Analysis of Global E-government. Public Organiz Rev 7, 317–329 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-007-0040-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-007-0040-5