ICTlogy

Abstract:

The United Nations E-Government Survey 2018: Gearing E-Government to Support Transformation towards sustainable and resilient societies was launched on July 19 2018.

It offers a snapshot of trends in the development of e-government in countries across the globe:

• European countries lead e-government development globally; the Americas and Asia share almost equal standing in high and middle e-government index levels, and many African countries continue to struggle to improve their e-government standing.
• Eight of the 11 new countries that joined the very-high performing group in 2018 are from Europe (Belarus, Greece, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, Poland, Portugal and the Russian Federation) and two are from Asia (Cyprus and Kazakhstan).
• The progress in e-government development in the Americas and Asia is albeit slow, but noticeable. Two thirds of countries in Asia (31 out of 47) and almost half of countries in Americas (15 out of 35) have above the world average EGDI score of 0.55.
• Uruguay is the only Latin American country with Very-High EGDI scores, joining the other two forerunners in the Americas region in this group - United States and Canada.
• Only 4 countries out of 54 in Africa score higher than the world average EGDI of 0.55, whereas 14 countries have very low EGDI scores below 0.25. These countries are also low-income and likely to face constraints in allocating necessary resources for e-government development.
• The disparity in e-government development level is also rather high among the countries in both Africa and Oceania regions. Australia and New Zealand are the only two countries in Oceania that score as high as 0.9053 and 0.8806 respectively. The scores for the other 12 countries range between 0.2787 and 0.5348, which is below the world average of 0.55.
• Generally, there is a positive correlation between the country’s income level and its e-government ranking. High-income countries have very-high or high EGDI scores. This is not universal, however. Twenty-two upper middle-income and 39 lower-middle income countries have EGDI scores below the global EGDI average and 10 countries in the lower middle-income group have scores above the global EGDI average. The lower income countries, on the other hand, continue to lag behind due to relatively low level of development of all Index’s components.
• For the first time in 2018 the main contributor of EDGI scores improvement in all income groups is development of online services, suggesting that globally, there was a steady progress in improving e-government and public services provision online.
• All 193 Member States of the United Nations had national portals and back-end systems to automate core administrative tasks, and 140 provide at least one transactional service online. The trend of improvement in transactional online services is strong and consistent in all assessed categories with the three most commonly used services being payment for utilities (140 countries), submitting income taxes (139 countries), and registration of new business (126 countries).
• Increasingly, more countries provide online services targeted to the most vulnerable groups. From the regional perspective, Europe continues to lead in online service delivery for all vulnerable groups reaching almost universal coverage across the region or over 80 per cent of all European countries.
• The number of countries providing online services using emails, SMS/RSS feed updates, mobile Apps and downloadable forms has been increasing in all sectors. For instance, up to 176 countries provide archived information online compared to 154 in 2016.