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[egov4devnews] eGov in DCs: 80% of People; Only 20% of eGov Users

eGovernment in Developing Countries: 80% of the world's population, 20% of its e-government users.

I've just been doing some calculations which estimate that, worldwide, roughly 400m people have ever used e-government (defined as accessing Web-based government information or services). Of these, 320m come from middle- and high-income countries (Europe including Russia plus Japan, Israel, Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand): that's 25% of the population of those countries. The remaining 80m come from developing countries - 1.6% of the population of those countries. So developing countries represent 80% of the world's population but only 20% of its e-government users.

A note that these are estimates for those who have EVER used e-government - rough estimates from Accenture data are that around 40% of these numbers would, if asked, have used e-government in the past one year.

Want to know how I arrived at this estimate?:

a) ITU provides statistics on the number of Internet users in each country and region.

b) Surveys by Pew, Accenture and Taylor-Nelson-

Sofres provide us with estimates of the percentage of Internet users who have ever made use of e-government. This figure is roughly 60% for middle- and high-income economies. It is much less than that for poorer economies because of the lower availability of e-government - estimates for these rely on much scantier data with a big range: running from 10% of Internet users ever having used e-gov as the lowest to around 40% as the highest for countries like Malaysia. Taking an average of these plus other figures within the range, leads to a rough estimate that 25% of Internet users in developing countries have ever used e-government.

c) Multiply the a) figures by the b) figures to get an estimate of all those who have ever accessed e-government.

I'd like to know if anyone else has other methods or figures for actual numbers of people using e-government in developing countries or globally.

Richard Heeks
Development Informatics Group
University of Manchester, UK

Study our MSc in ICTs for Development:
http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/postgraduate/masters/mscict.htm

posted by Unknown @ 12:19 AM