e-Macao Research Report 024 - Global Survey of Electronic Government

ADEGBOYEGA OJO; ELSA ESTEVEZ; TOMASZ JANOWSKI

2004-09-01/2005-04-01

1-261

Organizacional

Des.Socioecon.y Serv.-Varios

E-Government is a major element of the emerging Information Society. It is one of the primary vehicles used by governments across the world for public sector reforms and to offer high quality services at reduced cost to citizens and other stakeholders. There are at present various initiatives for advancing e-government and e-society in general at national, regional and global levels. Notable among these initiatives are the eEurope, e-Africa and e-ASEAN programmes. Several international and corporate organizations (for instance the United Nations and Accenture) benchmark countries in terms of the availability of requisite technical infrastructure and human capital available for e-government development. They also report on the maturity of public services provided online. The United Nations Department for Economics and Social Affairs (UN-DESA), Accenture, Centre for Public Policy, Brown University (CPP-BU) and the Economist Intelligence Unit/IBM Institute for Business Values (EIU), provide annual reports on e government readiness and online service delivery.This survey examines the reports provided by these four organizations between 2000 and 2004. It also investigates the availability of specific features and a set of 20 commonservices on 67 government websites spread across the major regions of the world. The services are the EU list of common public services to be delivered electronically within the context of the eEurope initiative. These services are classified into Income Generating, Registration, Returns, Permits and Licenses services.The survey specifically sets out to: 1) determine the global progress in e-government in terms of e-readiness and online presence maturity; 2) determine the global and regional leaders in terms of e-government readiness, e-service delivery and provision of common e government services; 3) estimate Macao's e-readiness and the maturity of its online presence; 4) determine the extent to which Macao provides services of common interest; 5) provide recommendations to guide Macao e-government programmes. The survey relies upon two basic categories of data: 1) data on specific features provided on 67 government websites relating to information availability, service delivery and public access; 2) e-government related rankings from 2000 to 2004 by the UN-DESA, Accenture, CPP-BU and EIU - UN-DESA reports on global e-government readiness: 2001, 2003 and 2004; Accenture e-government leadership reports: 2000-2004; CPP-BU global e-government reports - 2001-2004, EIU e-readiness rankings reports: 2000-2004. Data analysis entailed computing descriptive statistics and correlations on the first category of data and a meta-analysis of the four above mentioned report series. The global outlook of e-government is described along three major dimensions: 1) e-readiness; 2) online presence maturity; and 3) availability of common services.