Governments have made rapid progress worldwide in embracing ICT technologies for e-government in the past years. In 2001, the UN E-government Survey listed 143 member states as using the Internet in some capacity; by 2004, 93 per cent or 178 out of 191 member states had a website presence.
Broad trends of e-government development around the world in 2004 reaffirm that political ideology, economic and social systems; level of development; resource availability, human and technological infrastructure; institutional framework and cultural patterns all have a bearing on how, and how well, an e-government initiative is utilized.
Rapid progress in the initial stages of e-government development has led to other features being added in 2004. Around 85 to 92 per cent of all countries online now provide some of the databases and or laws, policies and other documents. However, only about one third of all countries provided public services online: almost the same as last year.
Notwithstanding improvement, a fuller spectrum of transactional services online, however, has remained limited to mostly the developed countries. Whereas more than three fourths of countries (170 countries) allow for down loading of forms for services such as drivers license, etc only 18 percent (32 countries) offer the citizen the facility of making payment by a credit card.
An important finding of last year’s Survey was that not many countries utilized the full potential of e government to provide information and services to their citizens. This still holds for the majority of the countries. What is different in one year is that the handful of developed countries, which till last year were providing only some transactional services, surged forward. Their utilization levels rose tremendously.
Exploring the access divide elements the Access Model illustrates that the majority of the developing country population of more than 5 billion faces a grave challenge from the new technological revolution. Whereas some of the developing countries which have in place the right mix of reforms, institutions and programs will no doubt benefit from the ICTs, most are likely to be mired in a cycle of low income, poverty and a growing disparity in access to modern technology.
posted by Unknown @ 6:49 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home