ABSTRACT
E-governance is regarded as a critical indicator of smart cities, but the measurement of e-governance efficiency requires further consideration. Pursuing this research strand, the paper proposes an e-governance efficiency index (EEI) that is then applied to Chinese cities. The results show that e-governance efficiency in Chinese cities is spatially uneven. Overall, the newly proposed index can be used in supporting analyses and assessments of smart governance.
E-governance is a critical indicator of smart cities, where efficiency is understood as a key consideration of e-governance (Bernardo, Citation2019). Existing methods of evaluating e-governance often overlook measures of efficiency that can be applied in the context of data scarcity and a lack of advanced expertise.
The key factors in measuring e-governance efficiency relate to the speed of handling a single case and the total number of cases processed (Darem, Citation2013; Moon, Citation2002). This shares similarities with a well-known indicator: the H index. It quantifies scholarly performance as both the number and citations of papers, achieving the effect of describing productivity and impact with a single value. In order to provide a simple and implementable tool to measure the efficiency of e-governance, introducing the idea of the H index, we propose the e-governance efficiency index (EEI). EEI can simultaneously reveal information about the number of governance cases and the processing time with a single value. It is calculated as the number of cases (C) handled in a predefined time threshold, C × α (for detailed explanations on the measurement and parameter α, see the Appendix in the supplemental data online). A higher EEI indicates that government spends less time on cases, and consequently e-governance efficiency is higher. Guided by this framework, we map the EEI pattern of China (). Our data were derived from a well-known website: the People’s Daily Online from 2020 to 2021 (293,196 items in total).
Figure 1. E-governance efficiency index (EEI) map of China.
![Figure 1. E-governance efficiency index (EEI) map of China.](/cms/asset/53aee0a6-7516-4023-ba50-f87ac1355958/rsrs_a_2234438_f0001_oc.jpg)
Several cities, such as Beijing and Chengdu, record the highest EEI, while there are 271 cities whose EEI distribution is in the low range of [0,448]. Moreover, the differences in e-governance efficiency are also among different provinces. Spatial contraction in the north-western regions, including Xinjiang, Tibet, Lhasa, Inner Mongolia and three north-eastern provinces, is notable, while the economically developed eastern regions, including Shandong, Fujian and Zhejiang, are also severely squeezed. However, there is a high achievement of e-governance in central and northern provinces (e.g., Hunan and Anhui). In most cases, the provincial capital cities often have the highest e-governance efficiency.
What this brief analysis indicates is that the EEI offers potential benefits to analysts interested in measuring and monitoring e-governance efficiency in China and internationally.
Supplemental Material
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
REFERENCES
- Bernardo, M. D. R. M. (2019). Smart city governance: From e-government to smart governance. In Information Resources Management Association (Ed.), Smart cities and smart spaces: Concepts, methodologies, tools, and applications (pp. 196–232). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-7030-1
- Darem, A. B. (2013). Measuring the efficiency of e-government websites. International Journal of Computer Applications, 70(22), 43–49. https://doi.org/10.5120/12203-8501
- Moon, M. J. (2002). The evolution of E-government among municipalities: Rhetoric or reality? Public Administration Review, 62(4), 424–433. https://doi.org/10.1111/0033-3352.00196