Do Digital Public Services Matter? A Comparative Study of the Czech Republic and the Republic of Kazakhstan

Abstract

Provision of quality public services has been in great concern of many governments for longer period of time. An interesting fact could be observed that, as to the demand and supply of digital public services, some developed European countries could lag behind some upper-middle-income countries. The paper explores differences in digital public services provision (supply side) and use (demand side) between the Czech Republic and Kazakhstan. A document analysis was done and a comparative study based on secondary data was elaborated. We can confirm that even a country from outside of the EU (Kazakhstan) can provide a better organized supply of digital services than an EU member state (Czech Republic) at least on the national level. According to the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) benchmarking, there are also significant discrepancies among national, regional and local services in the EU. The same phenomenon is also reported from transitional countries like Kazakhstan.

Shopping Via Mobile Phones in the Central European Czech Republic Market

“…The Czech Republic is also on the top position in the number of e-shops per capita in the Europe (Ulman et al, 2016). Smart phones can be used during the shopping process to expand information Source: Authors' research, 2017 on the product.…”

Global e-government development: besides the relative wealth of countries, do policies matter?

“…Although some international perspectives on the subject address local e-government development (Wohlers, 2009;Maciel et al, 2016;Ingrams et al, 2018), the vast majority consider the country level as the basis for analysis. Among the latter, common approaches include the use of EGDI for performing comparative analysis in regional contexts (Aniscenko et al, 2017;Torres-Porras and Duarte-Amaya, 2018;Brimkulov and Baryktabasov, 2017) or between specific countries (Kurdi et al, 2016;Ulman et al, 2016) and to identify global trends. In this section, we review the studies that adopt the latter approach, as it is the same adopted in this study.…”