Towards Synthetic and Balanced Digital Government Benchmarking

Reliable benchmarking is essential for effective management of the government digitalization efforts. Existing benchmarking instruments generally fail to support this target. One problem is the diversity of instruments, resulting in a split image of digital progress and adding ambiguity to policy decisions. Another problem is disconnect in assessing progress between digital and traditional “analog” governance, lending support to a dangerous idea that countries can compensate for lack of progress in their governance systems by simply digitalizing them. This paper provides a path to addressing both problems by: aggregating relevant indicators of the World Economic Forum’s Network Readiness Index (NRI) to obtain a single synthetic measure of digital government, balancing this measure with progress in analog governance using World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), calculating new measures for the latest editions of NRI and WGI, and discussing results. Technically, the paper applies multidimensional linear ordering and factor analysis

Chain Action - How Do Countries Add Value Through Digital Government?

This study examines how countries develop and benefit from Digital Government (DG). The literature proposes various conceptualizations of the value-adding logic of DG, but the benchmarking practice is not responding to such proposals. For instance, the United Nations’ E-Government Survey combines the readiness and uptake indicators and fails to cover any impact indicators; thus, its diagnostic value is limited. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new assessment scheme based on the DG value chain concept and pursue the question: how do the world countries add value in this chain? Reassembling the UN’s e-Government Survey indicators and the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, we examine how the 191 UN Member States converted their readiness into uptake and uptake into impact over the 2014-2018 period. The results rank the countries concerning their performance along the DG value chain, identify hotspots, and calculate the valu