Asian geographies of e-government

Abstract

Roughly, 40 percent of people in Central, South, East, and Southeast Asia now use the Internet. Given the technology’s growth, many governments have adopted it to reshape how they interact with their citizens, including tax collection and service provision. There are a variety of applications of e-government ranging from downloading of forms to more interactive types, such as applications for licenses, Internet voting, and citizen input into public policy. This paper opens with a review of e-government and its implications. Second, it turns to the digital divide in Asia, a major obstacle to e-government implementation. Third, it utilizes two measures of e-government compiled by the United Nations: the e-government readiness and e-participation scores, to provide an overview of how e-government implementation varies among the region’s countries. The fourth part offers a series of vignettes that highlight how e-government varies among countries, including the most and least successful examples. It concludes by emphasizing that there is no standard model that can be used to understand the phenomenon; rather e-government must be understood contextually and in a geographically specific manner.

Keywords:

• e-government
• Internet
• cyberspace