Asian geographies of e-government

Abstract

Roughly, 40 percent of people in Central, South, East, and Southeast Asia now use the Internet. Given the technology's growth, many governments have adopted it to reshape how they interact with their citizens, including tax collection and service provision. There are a variety of applications of e-government ranging from downloading of forms to more interactive types, such as applications for licenses, Internet voting, and citizen input into public policy. This paper opens with a review of e-government and its implications. Second, it turns to the digital divide in Asia, a major obstacle to e-government implementation. Third, it utilizes two measures of e-government compiled by the United Nations: the e-government readiness and e-participation scores, to provide an overview of how e-government implementation varies among the region's countries. The fourth part offers a series of vignettes that highlight how e-government varies among countries, including the most and least successful examples. It concludes by emphasizing that there is no standard model that can be used to understand the phenomenon; rather e-government must be understood contextually and in a geographically specific manner.The extremely rapid growth of the Internet -now used by 37 percent of the world's population -has unleashed enormous changes in how the planet's netizens (Internet users) communicate, are entertained, shop, obtain information, and interact. It has also changed how governments interact with their citizens. Electronic government, or e-government, has become increasingly widespread not only in the economically developed world, but in developing countries as well. Definitions of e-government vary (Yildiz 2007), but all involve the use of the Internet to deliver government information and services, change administrative procedures, and improve citizen input and participation. Web 2.0, which allows users to interact with government bureaucracies rather than just passively receive information, has expedited this process considerably. The topic has been extensively scrutinized by scholars (for a review, see Rocheleau 2007). However, the bulk of such work concentrates on e-government in economically developed countries, while developing ones have been largely overlooked (Basu 2004).This paper examines e-government in Asia (here defined to exclude the Middle East), including its Central, South, East, and Southeast components. It has two primary goals: first, it seeks to illustrate that e-government has made steady gains throughout the region. Second, it demonstrates that social and spatial context matters: e-government preparedness, implementation, policies, and effects are highly uneven among (and likely *

Incentives for the Adoption of E-Government by Greek Municipalities

“…Previous studies also confirm that the main obstacle to adoption of e-government is the lack of financial opportunities (Moon, 2002;Beynon-Davies and Martin, 2004;Hahamis et al, 2005;Previtali and Bof, 2009;Kamal et al, 2009;Alexopoulos et al, 2018), since a change at community level requires a huge amount of resources from multiple sources of funding (Chen et al, 2009) and the successful egovernment implementation occurs when the organization provides sufficient funding (Gallego-Alvarez et al, 2010;Warf, 2014;Ma, 2014).…”

“…For example, a lot of research has generally concentrated on the role played by organizational, technological (Previtali and Bof, 2009) and related factors that vary according to specific initiatives and frameworks (Arduini et al, 2013). More specifically, researchers examined organizational complexity (Gallego-Alvarez et al, 2010), political support (Thompson, 2002;Hahamis et al, 2005;Carrizales et al, 2011, Ma, 2014van Loon and Toshkov, 2015), commitment (Rose et al, 2015), leadership, employee pressure (Ma, 2013;Warf, 2014), culture and communication strategy (Ford and Murphy, 2008).…”

“…Moreover, a large number of researches investigate individual factors such as: per capita income (Youngblood και MacKiewicz, 2012), type of agency and governance (Moon, 2002;Pina, 2007;Reddick and Norris, 2013b;Bonsón et al, 2015, Feeney andBrown, 2017), geographical location (Nasi et al, 2011), race, metropolitan status (central city, suburban), population size, education (Reddick and Norris, 2013b), lack of knowledge and skills, average age of users (Choudrie et al, 2013), socio-economic status and socio-demographics population characteristics (Lev-On and Steinfeld, 2015), organizational size, internet penetration rate, regional competition (Ma, 2013), communication processes management with other authorities (Hultèn and Björkstrand, 2009), initiation, municipal actualization and rapid scaling-up (Chen et al, 2009) and political stability (Gallego-Alvarez et al, 2010). Microblogging has been studied by Ma (2014) and the use of ICT by Hahamis et al (2005), while other researchers focused on e-government experience (Reddick and Norris, 2013b), sufficient ICT staff, and a dedicated team (Carrizales et al, 2011, Warf, 2014Alexopoulos et al, 2018), effective ICT training and support, the ability to organize effective interfaces with end users (Arduini et al, 2010) and finally the implementation and exploitation of funded programs (Goulas and Kontogeorga , 2009).…”

“…To promote e-government initiatives, Municipalities are very likely to interact each other to exchange information for better decision-making, while "imitation" processes play an important role (Schedler and Summermatter, 2007;Jun and Weare, 2011) in the elaboration of their development models (Calista et al, 2010;Rooks et al, 2017). It is also important to build appropriate institutional capacity, including strategic plans with clearly defined priorities (Lampathaki et al, 2010;Warf, 2014;Gallego-Alvarez et al, 2010), goals and roles (Xia, 2010), and even a dual strategy for the negative effects of ICT development on social life, work and related areas as well as on civil liberties of users (Garrett, 2005).…”

Open government ideologies in post-soviet countries

“…As earlier research shows, the institutional barriers for e-government such as work culture, lack of coherent standards and supportive legislation are large in CIS countries (Bershadskaya et al, 2013). There is furthermore a lack of a free public sphere and civil rights in many parts of the region (Freedman, 2005), a significant corruption (Welton, 2011), and a substantial digital divide (Warf, 2014). The parts of the region where the institutional readiness for open government is larger, e.g., in Estonia, Moldova, Russia and Lithuania, participation had a more prominent role in the plans.…”