Policy matters? An analysis of outliers in the UN e-government index

Abstract

The United Nations (UN) publishes annual results for its E-Government Development Index (EGDI) since 2003. By ranking countries according to their capacity and willingness to use e-government, this index extremely useful. It allows countries to benchmark against each other and to track their evolution. Nevertheless, when comprehensive analyses are at stake, a relevant problem with this index is that results are highly correlated with the GDP per capita of the countries. Taking this into consideration, this paper tries to find to what extent political commitment and quality of public policies have an effect in actual e-government development, despite the differences on the relative wealth of countries. To answer this question, an analysis of the outliers in the UN EGDI index is presented. Mixed methods are used. First, outliers in the EGDI are identified by inspecting the residuals of a linear regression having the 2018 EGDI as dependent variable and the logarithm of the GDP per capita as the independent variable. Second, the cases of the outlying countries are studied by analyzing their national e-government strategies and plans or published research referring to their cases. Conclusions are that the concrete political situation of the studied countries, the quality of their policy instruments and their capacity to implement the policies contributes to explain the discrepancies against the results of the proposed statistical model. Thus, besides the relative wealth, policy matters. These conclusions might prove useful for practitioners by stressing the relevance of good strategies and development plans for e-government development, namely in developing countries. For researchers, the alternative method used for ranking countries proposed in this paper can be used as a base for further studies.