Using Social Development Lenses to Understand E-Government Development

Abstract

As governments at different levels and all around the world are increasingly using the Web to enhance and improve their services, understanding e-government development and exploring factors that affect e-government development have become important research topics. The purpose of this research is to investigate factors explaining e-government development in terms of social development lenses. Based on growth and regional development theories, the paper hypothesizes that income level, development status, and region are three factors that differentiate egovernment development in countries. Group comparison tests are conducted using secondary data from the United Nations and the United Nations Development Programme. The results support the hypotheses that significant differences in egovernment development exist between countries with respect to the three categorical variables mentioned above. In addition, the paper applies planned post-hoc tests to further investigate the differences. The results of this research are valuable to e-government scholars and practitioners. As the research involves data from more than a hundred countries, the research contributes to understanding e-government development factors on a global scale.

From Emerging to Connected E-Government: The Effects of Socioeconomics and Internal Administration Characteristics

“…Consequently, previous studies that have analyzed the influence of economic wealth (e.g., Christiaens, 1999;Laswad et al, 2005;Siau and Long, 2006;Kim, 2007;Tolbert et al, 2008;Serrano-Cinca et al, 2009) have usually found a positive association between the level of wealth and the use of e-government.…”

“…Therefore, e-government is currently considered to be not only a tool for reporting but also an effective communication channel for citizens to participate in democratic institutions and political processes (Justice et al, 2006;Siau and Long, 2006). In this way, the image of the public administration can be improved; citizens can perceive governments as accessible, transparent, responsible, effective and participatory as they increasingly use public websites to communicate and to conduct procedures and complete paperwork with them (Tolbert and Mossberger, 2006).…”

“…According to most of the previous studies, the development of e-government overall depends on a country"s economic performance (Siau and Long, 2006); strong economic performance can be considered a necessary condition for egovernment to develop (Kim, 2007).…”

“…Several studies have analyzed how far digital administration has developed (i.e., West, 2000West, , 2001West, , 2002West, , 2003West, and 2004Caba et al, 2005;Torres et al, 2005;Torres et al, 2006;Christou and Simpson, 2009), while other have focused on format and volume, the quality of the budgetary and financial information disclosed (i.e., Laswad et al, 2005;Cárcaba and García, 2008) and factors associated with the degree of development of e-government (i.e., Siau and Long, 2006;Kim, 2007;Pina et al, 2007b;Tolbert et al, 2008;Gandía and Archidona, 2008).…”

Cloud Based Public Collaboration System in Developing Countries

“…Since the 1990s, public-sector organizations across the globe have been applying internet technology and other computing technologies in innovative ways to deliver services, engage citizens, and improve efficiency using a set of practices commonly known as electronic government (e-government) [1]. E-Government is rapidly becoming one of the government's critical means for the provision of seamless services for public agencies, businesses, and citizens [2,3]. It is the use of information and communication technologies as a tool to achieve better government.…”